Forests are one of the iconic symbols of British Columbia, and successive governments and companies operating here have largely focussed on the cheap, commodity lumber business that benefits industry. Former provincial forestry minister Bob Williams, who has been involved with the industry for five decades, proposes regional management of this valuable natural resource to benefit […]

For the first time, this winter we are making Our Schools/Our Selves available in its entirety online. This issue of Our Schools/Our Selves focuses on a number of key issues that education workers, parents, students, and public education advocates are confronting in schools and communities, and offers on-the-ground commentary and analysis of what needs to […]

In anticipation of tomorrow’s provincial budget in British Columbia (BC), I’ve written a blog post about the state of homelessness in that province.

Points raised in the blog post include the following:

-Public operating spending by BC’s provincial government has decreased over the past 20 years.

-Even after controlling for inflation, average rent levels across the province increased by 24% between 1990 and 2016.

-Over the past several decades, various reforms to BC’s social assistance system have made it harder to qualify for benefits and have resulted in lower benefit levels to those who are eligible.

-A lack of affordable housing is making it very challenging for front-line practitioners to practice the ‘housing first’ approach (i.e., providing a homeless person with immediate access to affordable housing).

-BC’s new NDP government has undertaken important initiatives that may have the effect of reducing homelessness.

Yesterday I spoke on a panel discussion on economic inequality, along with Andrew Jackson and Armine Yalnizyan. We were guests at the federal NDP’s policy convention in Ottawa. The panel was moderated by Guy Caron.

Topics covered included the minimum wage, basic income, affordable housing, the future of jobs, gender budgeting, poverty among seniors, Canadian fiscal policy in historical perspective, and Canadian fiscal policy in comparison with other OECD countries.

That is the well chosen title of a marvelous new book by Gerry Helleiner, sub-titled Memoirs of a Life in International and Development Economics. Helleiner, from his home base at the University of Toronto, tells us in this most readable book, in his own modest way, the stories, notably from Africa, of how he devoted his life as an economist to that end. His rewards include his membership in the Order of Canada.

Helleiner describes himself as a progressive economist and is so judged by scholars. He has a strong commitment to social justice, to aiding the cause of poor countries, particularly the smaller of them, and the poorest within those poor countries.

His advise has been frequently sought by those involved in economic development in what we now call the Global South. His students have pursued successful careers in developing countries and with NGOs in the developed countries, and he is justly proud of that.

There is an abundance of quotable quotes. “Economics is not where everyone goes for inspiration or excitement. But I must say that my life as a teaching and practicing economist has been deeply fulfilling and at times wildly exciting.” Surely a great recommendation for being a progressive economist.,

For Helleiner economics is not a dismal science. “I believe the record of the past half century [with particular reference of Africa] which, in truth, does make some despair, can instead inspire hope for the kind of dramatic positive change that is possible.” This is a powerful message to progressive economists of hope in hard times.

On an issue that should be dear to the heart of progressive economists, Helleiner appeals for graduate studies in economics to be more heterodox, and less theory-driven . He describes how his own department at Toronto fell victim to these North American tendencies and how this has adversely affected the program in economic development. (So too was my own field of economic history.)

Ultimately, of course, economics which preaches the virtue of markets must itself respond to their evident failures. Helleiner’s passionate pleas should hasten that day.

The following is a contribution in the blog series on the exceptional contribution of Stephen Clarkson to Canada. Stephen Clarkson died in 2016. The substantial work he undertook on Canada and international trade is particularly relevant today as negotiations on NAFTA and other trade agreements occur.

Stephen Clarkson receiving the Order of Canada

Daniel Drache

Daniel Drache was a long-time colleague and friend of Stephen. He is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at York University and former Director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies. His work focuses on understanding the changing character of the globalisation narrative in its economic, social and cultural dimensions. He has worked extensively on the WTO’s failed Doha Round with particular focus on TRIPS and public health, food security and nutrition, and poverty eradication.

The Clarkson Story up until Now and the Uncertain Future of the WTO

Daniel Drache

The Clarkson Gaze

The story so far is about the events roiling the global economy and Stephen’s unique gaze in the way in which he interpreted them. His inexhaustible appetite for research on North America, globalization, political parties, political leaders and, above all, the power dynamics between Uncle Sam and stick figure Johnny Canuck gave him an over-sized palette.[1] He was focused on big ideas, instinctively drawn to the most important: the continuing relevance of sovereignty and state power at a time of interdependence.

In a way that makes history full of surprises, the story until now is that many governments also share a growing scepticism about the effectiveness of the WTO dispute resolution mechanism, a topic which loomed large in Clarkson’s writing and research. In 2014, only seven new cases were filed, a paltry number in a trillion dollar plus commercial world. For the two previous decades, there were 450 cases, the majority were North South and North North. The US, Canada, and the EU were the most litigious, as well as Brazil and India have become “trade warriors” in defence of their core interests. Most other Global South countries had neither the legal culture nor the money to roll the dice in the WTO trade dispute lottery-like system.

In 1994, when the system was brand new, the number of cases averaged about 40 per year, and, since then, with more than 100 new members the trade gendarme of the world barely averages a baker’s dozen. Where have all disputes gone?

Clarkson was aware that WTO rules are very confrontational and thought-provoking in this regard. The WTO permits states to use protectionist policies not always, but frequentlNumerous experts and scholars believed that globalization had made the world borderless, where people, ideas and commodities all moved across the world with few constraints. Conventional wisdom argued that the once mighty Westphalian state was so porous that it could no longer defend national values and goals.[2] Many scholars embraced the notion that, in an age of global cultural and economic flows, borders were dysfunctional barriers in need of further dismantling. Stephen did not.

Instead his work was a curious hybrid of seeing the world through the eyes of an increasingly bleak dystopia about Canada’s chances of surviving the python-like embrace of market-driven integration. On better days, he became a hard-nosed sceptic about these mega-trade deals when Canada’s policy élites were stumbling over each other to ink new ones, first with Uncle Sam, Mexico and then a whole host of other countries including the EU, China, India, Korea and Israel, to name but the most important. He was arguably the best Canadian researcher at documenting and de-constructing this neo-liberal universe, thereby exposing Canada’s chronic dependent relationship on the US with less and less policy-space to manoeuvre with each passing decade.[3] In his own words,

“With NAFTA and an emboldened WTO, Canadian programs suddenly found themselves subject to invasive WTO commercial norms and export centric policies that marginalized any need for industrial strategies to diversify and build stronger Canadian industries as a buffer zone against the excesses of resource dependency.”

He raged against the Liberal state machine that was always eager to go with the continental flow of power and resources, and he believed that the big red machine of the Liberal Party could be stopped although it was likely not to happen. So, he was a unique figure who had at the very least two voices: a critical observer of the trade governance system and, in moments of lucidity and despair, an advocate of more radical institutional surgery, namely, to sink the investor state dispute settlement provision (ISDS) and, along with it, much of the system of trade governance.

There is much we can learn from the Clarkson gaze about the tightly-written future and the unpredictable wild swings of global dynamics from global economic integration. With hard Brexit, the election of Trump, the cancellation of the TPP and now the unilateral re-opening of NAFTA, we’ve entered a different and dangerous age with less stability than ever. US President Trump has become Canada’s worst nightmare, attacking Canadian dairy and lumber practices, and demanding fundamental change to the NAFTA agreement. All these projects gave Clarkson a vast canvas and focused his attention on the incompatibility between the requirements of these trade agreements and the anxieties that citizen experience about job loss, threats to the environment, and growing inequality. He also worried that the rise of powerful ‘nixers’ in Washington and the corrosive forces of structural adjustment had irreversibly transformed the landscape of international relations from everything that went before.[4]

These tropes are still very much with us today to fix, shrink or sink trade governance.[5] We need to think a lot about fear and anxiety, not only because of the ‘mad king’ Donald in Washington, but because the pillars of trade multilateralism are no longer coherent, even though they continue to be a force to be reckoned with. We will look at two big picture ideas of his. First, what Stephen identified occurring around us is the emergence of a highly flammable situation. When institutions fail to adapt to novel conditions, frequently like these times contagious, dangerous state policies migrate towards the center right and hard right neo-populist end of the spectrum. Secondly, analytically and intellectually he was absorbed by the deteriorating dynamics of the nixer-fixer crisis-fraught binary many states and social movements adopted in the search for options. This geopolitical positioning inevitably led them and him to radically different solutions about the uncertain future of trade governance.

Paralysis, Fear, and Decay

The growing paralysis triggered by polarized conjunctural politics as well as structural stagnation has its convoluted roots in the architecture and agenda of the WTO, which was oversold to governments as a guarantor and regulator of the world trading system.[6] It promised a level playing-field for all and a development accelerator for the Global South plus new market-access and increased competitiveness for industries on both sides of the global divide.

In the Clarkson view of the world, he saw something dramatically askew. The institutional wheels had fallen off these clichéd policies because trade deals had become an omnibus multipronged policy. In the process export-centric mega-deals went far beyond their original mandate. Instead, they became invasive investor-centric agreements that ubiquitously challenged the state’s competence to regulate effectively in the public interest. The predictable result was that governments are facing a backlash and push-back from social movements, non-scripted actors, and highly informed non-governmental organizations.[7]

In a primary sense Clarkson understood that that trade agreements were marketed to largely indifferent and often passive publics because there were no credible alternatives to the widely-subscribed belief that “There is no Alternative” (TINA). Doom and fatalism were the red lines of political discourse that could not be crossed. However, since 2008, (and often before the global financial crisis in the ‘Battle for Seattle’), a Niagara of campaigns, street demonstrations and social media mobilization energized publics, particularly in the EU where, in Germany, Belgium and France, grassroots social movements mobilized hundreds of thousands of protesters against the proposed Canada-EU free-trade agreement (CETA).

Still Clarkson’s dark pessimism about the unstoppable momentum of third-generation trade deals found itself on the right side of history. The future of many trade and investment deals are in limbo because European public opinion is increasingly suspicious and hostile to trade and investment deals. In 2017, the explosive decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the EU’s exclusive competence to enter into trade treaties without the approval of national legislatures was dealt a death blow. The Court found that the EU would have to submit ISDS agreements to all 30 national and subnational parties for individual approval.[8] Even critical observers could not have predicted such an outcome. The EU had hoped that the Court would give it exclusive jurisdiction without having to submit a trade treaty for national ratification. Brussel’s expectation was to be able to approve these trade and investment routinely. It did not want a re-occurrence of the Walloons casting a veto that held up the entire CETA ratification process, as it had done in 2016. The CJEU ruled against the EU. In shared jurisdictions with an ISDS provision, individual Member States will be required to give their assent.

One part of the Court’s decision re-inforced the national authority of Member States, but another extended the principle of transnationality. The ECJ gave the EU a green light to take the ISDS clause out of trade and investment treaties and move it into the institutional hands of an International Investment Court which is still to be established.

Stephen would have savoured and probably savaged this landmark decision because the Court not only shrunk the legal authority of the EU’s unilateral power, but it also removed labour, the environment, intellectual property rights, and public procurement as shared competencies that had previously been awarded in an earlier legal judgment. Had these shared competencies remained, it would have made signing new investment deals almost impossible and extremely arduous to negotiate, let alone ratify.

It is not surprising that the CJEU required Brussels to submit ISDS provisions to national governments. India has already imposed legislative restrictions on access to ISDS, Ecuador has withdrawn from 16 of its investment treaties, and South Africa has begun the process of terminating its investment treaties. In 2012, it passed new legislation that gives exclusivity to domestic remedies. Brazil has never signed into law investment-treaty provisions for privatized arbitration.[9]

All these countries are encouraging alternative dispute resolution outlined in “cooperation and investment facilitation” kinds of agreements. All this “nixing and fixing” of state activity would not have been possible without social media and popular mobilization against governments being sued by powerful corporate interests.

Now, the Court of Justice of the European Union has come out against such clauses unless they are submitted to national ratification procedures. Indeed, in the words of Steven Toope, “the world order is shifting”. The WTO will not be “great again” because its relative position in terms of its hard legal power and the political consensus that once made it unchallengeable has dimmed, if not, decayed. What is different is that, with the fragmentation of the global economy, it is also the time – to the surprise of many experts – to negotiate new rules, as we have just seen. For Clarkson he understood that there is no possibility of a new ‘grand social bargain’ to support new rights for citizens and labour but, at the margins, popular forces seem to have gained the capacity to mobilize despite neoliberalism and the politics of austerity.

WTO Marginalization in its Core Competence

Clarkson will be always remembered as a fierce critic of neoliberal embeddedness of the WTO. Perhaps the fact that Canadian governments had so unreservedly embraced its legal elite culture pushed Clarkson to embrace the rhetoric of the anti-globalization movement. Other developments have also cooled the ardour of many governments to put their faith in the efficacy of the crown jewels of the WTO dispute resolution system to protect them from the gale-like force of global competition. One of Clarkson’s persistent themes is that governments have turned away from this mechanism to seek relief for their battered industries from the consequences of structural adjustment triggered by open, highly de-regulated, economies. Increasingly, many countries have preferred to seek redress for trade grievances before national tribunals rather than bring cases to the world trade court of the WTO.

It is worth reminding ourselves that 80 per cent of the WTO membership has never used the dispute resolution panels because the majority of the WTO do not have the experience, the money, and the confidence in the system that is slow, unpredictable, and very costly, with no positive track record of handling, let alone, addressing within the terms of reference of its legal culture, the non-commercial aspects present in every trade dispute. These include food security, the need for state subsidies, the limitations of the principle of non-discrimination for industrial policy, the creation of fair labour standards, and the legal support for sustainable environmental practices – each a hot button issue of our times. Does not the narrowness of the WTO’s legal culture explain why so few Global South countries want to chance addressing more substantive issues through this trade body?

Put another way, there are very few WTO victories for “we the people”. One of the most iconic articles on the WTO’s legal straitjacket is by Joseph Weiler,[10] entitled The Rule of Lawyers and the Ethos of Diplomacy. In it, he warned against the rule of lawyers because the most optimal outcome in most interstate conflicts between governments is the need to find a trade compromise about conflict over a disputed subsidy, stockpiling for food security, incentives to develop local industry rather than an adversarial victory for the strongest state and profit-seeking multinationals.

Weiler predicted that legal principles masquerading as statecraft would eventually erode the underpinnings of its unbalanced legal culture. Weiler’s expectation about the growing illegitimacy of the WTO’s legal culture in the minds of many is dead accurate and has been one of the central factors in sustaining successful mobilization campaigns against third-generation trade and investment deals.

Growing State Scepticism towards the WTO

y when they experience the volatility of global markets endangering employment and entire industries.[11] The WTO gives states the green light to adopt protectionist policies under very restrictive conditions. Countries file complaints against predatory pricing, subsidy abusers and the nuclear “option-of-all-options”, safeguards for reasons of national security to protect the national interest when threatened by global conditions such as employment loss, import surges or the open-ended category, “unfair advantage” of some kind that governments can use to defend the imposition of tariffs or import duties before a national trade tribunal constituted to litigate such claims.

The Clarkson gaze is an excellent guide to what has happened in the last two decades with respect to countries turning their back on the WTO’s legal crown jewel. It is astonishing to realize that the number of anti-dumping petitions has exploded, totalling more than 4,300 compared with about 400 disputes filed with the WTO.[12] If we are looking for examples of de-stabilization, the contracting out of legal ordering to other authorities, surely, this is it. Countries are turning to their national tribunals and trade courts for short-term relief and can impose tariffs or countervailing duties n order to protect their industries under threat.

In the 1970s, voluntary export restraints were used successfully to protect US interests against Japanese auto imports. This strategy gave the US auto industry breathing space to modernize and upgrade. Of course, trade lawyers and economists rail against anti-dumping as going outside the WTO rules and its jurisdiction. What the experts are opposed to are competing national adjudication bodies which they claim are biased and unreliable. But there are many studies that show that, since these national tribunals largely follow the WTO rules of evidence, norms and practices, their win rate – the test for bias for the home team – are within standards of international practice. This parallel system operates – with all its strengths and weaknesses – quite efficiently to defend the “local” from powerful “global” interests.

It did not escape Clarkson’s attention that Washington has its own parallel and highly active dispute system accessible to all Americans industries as well as to groups including unions to demand an investigation into allegedly unfair competition.[13] It can impose tariffs, punishing duties and quotas on foreign imports for short-term, medium-term and long-term periods. A large part of the legislation is discretionary and arbitrary. It can give American industries breathing space and restrict foreign competition. Super 301 is an interim measure that cannot reverse the de-industrialization of American jobs and industries, but it can – and does – provide short-term relief to declining American industries and jobs that are at risk![14]

If we want better outcomes to address real dislocation, we require a body akin to the Court of Justice of the European Union or the European Court of Human Rights with a commitment to balance commercial market-based interests with sovereignty norms and practices that sets the standards for citizen-based rights and obligations. The European Court was set up to rule on individual or state application alleging violations of civil, political and human rights. Individuals can apply directly to it and it is delivered more than 10,000 judgments that require governments to change their laws and administrative practices. Is this the kind of Court needed to replace the creaky outmoded legal culture of the WTO?

The Privatized and Secretive Alternative: ISDS

Clarkson understood as well as anyone why trade governance is so dysfunctional at present. Anti-dumping provides an escape hatch against structural adjustment market forces imposed by the neo-liberal global economy. De-globalization paradoxically strengthens and extends neo-liberal norms and practices – often at the local level. In the Clarkson lexicon it represents a new and different phenomena in the globalization narrative – namely, the ability of global multinationals to challenge the regulatory sovereignty of nations in the public interest.

The investor state dispute settlement mechanism (ISDS) is highly problematical from a public policy point of view because of the very broad grounds that multinationals have to sue governments, including “fair and equitable treatment”, “expropriation of benefits”, “non-discrimination”, and “national treatment”. All these trade-related doctrines impose a heavy burden on governments to demonstrate that foreign multinationals receive “special consideration” in private courts, which is not available to nationally-domiciled companies.

State investor disputes are always about money and inevitably about environmental standards and review, health services, access to generic drugs, industrial policy, and labour standards. The rules favour investors, as they challenge the sovereignty and authority of democratically-elected governments to reduce their ability to legislate and defend the public interest.

According to the UNCTAD monitor, in 2016, there were 62 new ISDS cases filed, a record high. The 10 year average is a steady 45 filings a year – compared to the 12 complaints cases filed at the WTO. In the most recent 12 year period, there were more than 550 new cases worth hundreds of millions and millions of dollars in awards against governments without including the 50 billion USD award against Russia. Not surprisingly, the most frequent users are from the advanced block of countries. In the Dutch study of Arbitral Awards, multinational corporations are favoured by a ratio of two to one over states in the arbitral win-loss sweepstakes.[15]

These outcomes are critical standard-setters. Most decidedly, they have become a central feature promoting the growth in privatized commercial arbitration. It is safe to conclude that these out-of-public-sight in-camera arbitrations have outpaced and probably outperformed the WTO disputes resolution mechanism body as far as global capital is concerned. The explosive growth in privatized dispute resolution is itself evidence that Clarkson’s research led him to the conclusion that free trade agreements are about expanding, protecting and prioritizing investment rights for global finance with its own global dispute resolution mechanism – both characteristically non-transparent and invasive of national sovereignty. Global trade politics reinforced Clarkson’s nationalism and made him a strong defender of Canadian sovereignty in a country whose national narrative is weakly and erratically nationalistic. This, too, is part of the story so far in Clarkson’s long view of trade politics.

The Fixers-Nixers Binary and Conundrum

What he understood at a deep level is that at one end of a very long spectrum of conflicting ideas were those who accepted the idea that the system can be reformed; hence, the term “the fixers”. A second group starts at the other end of the spectrum that the mandate of the WTO needs to get back to trade basics, the so-called “shrink it” alternative policy option. Finally, a lot of radical social movements accept as true that the WTO is too flawed to save, hence, they want “to sink it” and replace it with a different kind of global trade governance organization.

Of the three options, the first believes it is possible to find a way to put the WTO back together again like a Humpty-Dumpty character. Some kind of fixing could make its trade and organizational architecture less clumsy, more fleet of foot, transparent, accountable and functional. There are technical fixes such as scrapping its “all or nothing rule” that makes consensus among 160 governments with over 70 per cent from the Global South almost impossible. Before members agree on any new trade round with its dozens of committees, all members have to agree unanimously to it. Effectively, this gives the Global South and the BRIC countries a veto over so-called deal breaking proposals coming from the old coalition, composed of the US, the EU and Japan, a fact that did not escape Clarkson’s acute grasp of the power dynamics that kept the organization deadlocked. But institutional paralysis could not prevent fundamental changes to the global trade agenda and the most important was to expand the rights of global capital to hold governments to account.[16]

The Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren calls the highly contentious investor state dispute settlement (ISDS) the “clause everyone should oppose” , a position he heartily endorsed and that plays a large role in Clarkson’s concept of international political economy, precisely because it diminishes state sovereignty and it enhances multinational power to beat back the regulatory authority of government. Under the ISDS, corporations have sued the Mexican government for over 200 million USD and Canada for 157 million USD. At present, a U.S. company is suing Canada for another 250 million USD over a moratorium on fracking for natural gas, and another firm – suing for more than 100 million USD over the rejection of a mining permit after a Canadian environmental impact assessment proved the project to be detrimental – won its case.

So, removing the ISDS clause, a source of bitter and prolonged controversy, would be an obvious candidate to drop from trade agreements. The EU and recently Canada have gone on record to support the creation of an International Investment Court to address the growing number of investment conflicts that multinationals face. This, too, is a source of controversy, and it may take years before the Court is established and approved by all 27 parliaments.[17]

The Narrow Ledge of Trade Governance

The fact of the matter is that the WTO, since its establishment, is exclusively a producers’ organization for large multinationals and states, not for consumers, not “for the people”. This is why it has such a narrow focus and mandate, an institutional feature that Clarkson pushed to the center of his research analysis. What he documented was that, when commercial interests are found to conflict with environmental protection, access to generic drugs, labour standards, or industrial strategy, global commercial interests inevitably carry the day in the WTO’s court system with its highly constrained legal culture. Why, for instance, is “fair and equitable” treatment of a private investor given the status of a constitutional right when it only serves the needs of special interest groups? It is this threshold test, among others, that is so central to WTO legal culture that requires resetting. Without it how could the WTO have a fresh start with a different purpose and organizational architecture around aims such as egalitarianism, development and other socially progressive goals?

If the governance agenda for negotiating a new trade round is limited to only trade issues, the most contentious part of the agenda – intellectual property rights, investment rights, public procurement, access to generic drugs, food security and environmental sustainability require a different solution, one which does not come through the narrow lens of trade. In the Clarksonian gaze, complex policy issues have to be addressed through a different kind of governance body that is equipped to handle the goals and objectives of a broad-based jurisprudence and the right of individuals in all countries to seek redress and transparent arbitration.

It is not a good idea that we think of this new body as setting hard law legislative standards in many areas at the global level. Instead, what is needed is a legal culture of balanced adjudication and arbitration, a European-style court. This is the high standard to consider. The important corollary is that legal cultures are subject to many constraints and the most important is when global standards are low, no global organization can substitute itself for national decision-making bodies.

At present, in a way few predicted the WTO is in relative decline as a global governance body, marginalized by atrophy and growing irrelevance for many nations in the global South. For experts from the advanced industrial countries it is a mistake to think that international institutions are forever, the ‘eternal, unchanging guardians’ of the world order. The WTO is in a Braudelian “time bubble chamber” unable to adapt to the new set of circumstances after the 2008 financial crisis. Its institutional paralysis, if anything, has deepened in the post-Brexit, post Trump era. The gravitational shift from trade-focused organization to an investment-centric institution has complicated the incredibly difficult task of building a new consensus.

Nor does the WTO have the resources to derail China’s well-advanced plans to create a parallel trade and investment global order with 100 or so countries. For the moment, only India and the United States are boycotting the One Belt, One Road (OBOR) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.(AIIB) To the surprise of few, bilateralism and regionalism are rapidly becoming the twin pillars of the new international order, largely, and surprisingly sponsored by China , through its $2 trillion global infrastructural initiative. And whatever strong doubts you may have about the efficacy of Beijing’s leadership, Chinese multilateralism is patiently waiting in the wings with its alternative institutions. For the moment we have entered a long transition period.

A Sartrian Dilemma: A World without Dominant Agency

In his last writings Stephen understood instinctively that in a multipolar world we cannot speak of a hegemonic order any longer because the world is so fragmented and fissured. Instead, it is more like a Sartrian moment, Huis clos: L’enfer, c’est les autres. But as Clarkson might have asked who exactly are the others?

Isn’t it more precise to say that it is ourselves and our dystopian fatigue who are responsible for the new age of high anxiety in some important way? This is the dilemma of our time which preoccupied Stephen Clarkson in his research and teaching. In an era of authoritarianism versus democracy, we need to rethink and re-engage with a global order that bears very little relationship with the precise rules and governance practices of global multilateralism. In his dystopian gaze, Clarkson’s large, expansive and rich narrative left little room for doubt that for him at least, there is no single scripted or unscripted actor waiting to rescue a deeply troubled global order, today, tomorrow or anytime soon.

[1] Among his many works are: Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism and the Canadian State, 2002, Trudeau and our Times (with Christina McCall),1990 and 1994, The Big Red Machine: How the Liberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics, 2005, Canada and the Reagan Challenge: Crisis in the Canadian-American Relationship, 1985, Does North America Exist?: Governing the Continent after NAFTA and 9/11, 2008, A Perilous Imbalance: The Globalization of Canadian Law and Governance (with Stepan Wood), 2010, Dependent America? How Canada and Mexico Construct US Power (with Matto Mildenberger), 2011.

[2] Kenichi Ohmae, A Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy, HarperCollins 1994; Daniel Drache, Borders Matter: Homeland Security and the Search for North America, Toronto: Fernwood, 2004.

The consensus forecast of just about everybody – the IMF, the OECD, the Bank of Canada, the Canadian banks – is that Canada will share in a global recovery from the stagnation which followed the financial crisis of a decade ago. All of the major economies – the US, the EU, China, Japan – are growing; business investment is finally on the upswing from depressed levels; world trade is on the rise again; and fiscal austerity has more or less run its course. Central bankers, we are told, can be counted on to only gradually increase ultra low interest rates even as growth returns to near normal levels and employment recovers.

The world economy is forecast to grow about 3.7% in 2018, and Canada is forecast to grow at a respectable 2.5%, a bit below the rate in 2017.

This relatively optimistic outlook may well be true for next year. Many economic indicators are indeed very positive. But there are grounds to think that structural obstacles to a global recovery remain formidable. Indeed this view is registered by the financial markets in continued very low long term interest rates, which are based on an expectation of slow growth and low inflation over the next decade.

As widely noted, the recent upturn has been felt almost everywhere only very weakly in terms of wage growth, which is in turn by far the major determinant of household demand. Wages are generally lagging behind even weak labour productivity growth despite a significant fall in unemployment rates in the United States, Canada and even the European Union. In Canada, household spending growth has remained dependent upon increased debt rather than rising wages, even as the job market has seemingly tightened.

While the consensus forecast assumes that wages will gradually pick up, it is unclear what mechanism will reconnect wages to productivity growth in the absence of major structural changes such as the revival of a shrinking labour movement or hikes to minimum wages. The rise of insecure work seems to be limiting wage increases even at low levels of unemployment.

High and rising economic inequality is also a structural drag on growth. The continuing tilt of income growth to the most affluent means that a relatively high proportion of income gains will be saved rather than spent. The excess of financial savings over real investment is another reason why long term interest rates remain low.

High levels of household debt in many countries, again very much including Canada, also weigh against consumption and thus final demand growth. The pace of borrowing is likely to slow as interest rates creep up, making spending even more dependent upon wage growth.

Again as widely noted, following a very slow recovery, business investment remains sub par despite expectations of growth, and a large share of buoyant corporate profits is still being hoarded as cash or paid out to shareholders rather than re-invested. Part of the reason seems to be that growth has become more tilted towards the “new” high tech/digital economy where costly physical capital requirements are low compared to the “old”economy where expansion was based on major investments in new machinery and equipment rather than in intangible and relatively cheap intellectual and human capital.

Productivity growth remains low. For all of the talk of the emergence of a highly dynamic digital economy and the threat to jobs from artificial intelligence and the robots, growth in output per hour has been generally low, not least in the United States, and even more so in Canada. Pessimists point to the still small weight of the digital economy in the overall economy, which tends to low productivity growth due to the increasing weight of labour intensive services which cannot easily be automated.

The lack of global economic co-ordination also undermines the potential for sustained growth. The basic economic strategy of most countries, certainly including Canada, is to increase global market share through higher business investment combined with a competitive cost structure. Global competition and labour cost arbitrage by global corporations weighs against wage and income growth, fettering the growth of the overall global market. This structural problem may be exacerbated by openly protectionist trade policies if Trump prevails against liberal trade deals such as NAFTA and the WTO. Part of the solution is to co-ordinate expansionary fiscal policies and also to promote labour rights and standards across the global economy.

Added to the structural barriers to growth is the potential for systemic financial problems to once again undermine stability. A decade long run of very low interest rates has inflated numerous asset bubbles. Many countries, including Canada, have highly inflated housing markets which are vulnerable to a correction which would have a big negative impact on household wealth and spending. Equity markets are widely considered to be significantly over-valued, as are high risk corporate securities, creating risks for the financial system should prices fall. Many corporations have taken on excessive debt to pay out dividends to shareholders.

In sum, there are reasons to believe that the prospects for a sustained recovery of the global economy are not quite as robust as the new consensus would have us believe.

There was little or no media coverage of the release of data on the distribution of the wealth of Canadians in 2016 last week, perhaps because there has been little or no change since the last Survey of Financial Security in 2012.

The top 20% of Canadians own 67.3% of all net worth (assets of all kinds minus liabilities), almost exactly the same as in 2012.

The bottom 20% have no net worth, and the bottom 40% collectively own just 2.3% of all net worth.

The top 20% also own 74.6% of all financial assets (stocks, bonds, bank deposits etc) held outside of RRSPs and registered pension plans, while the bottom 40% collectively own just 3.5% of such assets. Financial assets outside of pensions total $1.4 trillion.

Unfortunately, the new data does not detail the breakdown within the top 20%. Even within this group, wealth is highly concentrated in the hands of the top 10% and top 1%.

Clearly, taxable income from financial assets (interest, dividends, capital gains, stock options) flows overwhelmingly to a relatively small number of people. If the federal government was serious about progressive tax reform, they would be reducing the preferential treatment of such income in the personal income tax system. Over to you, Minister Morneau.

Over at the website of the Calgary Homeless Foundation, I’ve written a blog post about the Trudeau government’s recently-unveiled National Housing Strategy.

Points raised in the post include the following:

-One of the Strategy’s stated objectives is to reduce chronic homelessness in Canada by 50% over 10 years.

-The Trudeau government claims that this is Canada’s “first ever” national housing strategy. That claim may not be accurate.

-The Trudeau government appears to be overstating the likely impact of the Strategy. Specifically, they claim this will result in four times as many new builds (annually) going forward as were built annually between 2005 and 2015. Yet, the evidence does not appear to support that claim.

On November 17, the working group of the Alberta Alternative Budget (AAB) sponsored a one-day workshop at the University of Alberta. The event’s main purpose was to discuss recent developments in Alberta public policy, as well as expectations for the upcoming Alberta budget. Twenty speakers presented in total.

In light of what was discussed at the event, here are 10 considerations for the upcoming provincial budget:

Governments often face pressure to privatize important public services—yet, privatization sometimes comes with its own costs. According to my long-time social policy mentor Allan Moscovitch, privatization “refers to the movement from public to private service delivery.” Governments of all stripes typically want to reduce the short-term cost of delivering important services. However, privatizing important public services can result in higher costs of services, reduced quality of services, and a deterioration in working conditions. For example, during her presentation, Hitomi Suzuta noted that public long-term care facilities (operated by Alberta Health Services) provide approximately four hours of direct care per senior in a typical day, while for-profit facilities in the long-term care sector provide just three hours of direct care per day (for more on this, see this recent report by David Campanella).

For a new CCPA blog post on housing (un)affordability, I dove into the latest Census data for Metro Vancouver. I used two series on shelter cost and shelter-to-income ratio, and found that 32% of households were paying more than 30% of income on shelter (all households, owners and renters) and 16% of households more than 50% of income on shelter. The latter number is pretty alarming: one in six households in Vancouver paying more than half their income just to keep a roof over their heads; that’s 150,430 households!

Then I noticed that “core housing need” (CHN) in Metro Vancouver was 17.6%, a figure that is way lower. I have always understood CHN as three dimensions: affordability, measured as households paying more than 30% of income; adequacy, whether the housing is in need of repair; and suitability, if you have enough rooms for everyone.

So, my thinking went, CHN should be all of the un-affordability I discovered, and then some to reflect the other two dimensions. How then could CHN be so much lower than the share of households with shelter-to-income ratio above 30%? My instinct was to go back and check my sources and my math, hoping I had not made a major error somewhere. But that was all solid. So I did a deeper dive on CHN to figure this out.

First, some households paying more than 30% of income on housing but are just taken out. Those who are paying more than 100% of income are pulled out. This would be folks who have a relative paying their bills, for example, but also people who are using debt or other income not captured in their total (perhaps capital gains or inheritances).

Also exempted are students, and I found this on the CHN entry in the Census dictionary:

Non-family households with at least one maintainer aged 15 to 29 attending school are considered not to be in ‘core housing need’ regardless of their housing circumstances. Attending school is considered a transitional phase, and low incomes earned by student households are viewed as being a temporary condition.

This seems odd to me, saying you are too young to be in housing need, even if you are spending a large share of income on housing.

Next, there is this page with the new Census data on CHN, which states that after tallying the three dimensions of CHN I cite above, then:

The second stage established whether the household could be expected to have affordable access to suitable and adequate alternative housing by comparing the household’s total income to an income threshold based on local housing costs. Only those households who could not afford alternative housing would be considered in core housing need.

That’s a bit of a muddle. I also found this 2008 article discussing the concept, which notes:

Much work has been, and is being done, to examine those who spend 30 per cent or more of their household income to determine if they do so out of choice, through having the means and preference to spend more than the norm for housing, or out of necessity, because of their low incomes.

In other words, there are some households who pay more than 30% of income, but do so by choice, and if they wanted to they could move into cheaper digs and no longer pay more than 30% of income for housing. There’s some logic to this, I suppose, but in Vancouver the vacancy rate is below 1%, and that’s driving up rents. For ownership, home prices have surged such that few can afford to buy the house they live in – if they did not already own it. Unless you have a super-high income, on the margin you are looking at more than 30% of income in Vancouver for shelter.

The second stage is a black box, and perhaps that black box needs fixing. Whereas the share of households paying more than 30% is easy to understand, the determination of “comparing the household’s total income to an income threshold based on local housing costs” is not transparent. Rents in Vancouver according to CMHC have not gone up much in recent years, but that is because they are only counting decades-old purpose-built rental , while not counting the secondary suites and condos that have become a substantial part of the rental stock more recently. It is among the latter where loopholes allowing landlords “renovictions” and “fixed term leases” undermine rent controls, and have fed the dizzying cost of renting on the margin.

So Core Housing Need is looking to me more like the Low Income Cut Off is for measuring poverty: it is not straightforward in terms of measurement; was instead created by Canadian statisticians a long time ago to provide a more nuanced statistic; but, may no longer be relevant or helpful given changes in housing markets. There may also be some measurement issues.

Finally, I note that Steve Pomeroy makes some comments about CHN, welfare incomes and the feds’ national housing strategy plans in this piece for the Caledon Institute. He concludes:

As this analysis has revealed, core need is an ineffective and distorted measure of outcomes. Indeed, the federal and provincial/territorial governments could invest hundreds of millions of dollars to reform welfare and create a national housing benefit only to find that the levels of core need have not declined, even though housing affordability problems for many households had been alleviated.

So there you go, if you were wondering what the difference is between shelter cost greater than 30% of income and core housing need.

The following is a contribution in the blog series on the exceptional contribution of Stephen Clarkson to Canada. Stephen Clarkson died in 2016. The substantial work he undertook on Canada’s relationship to Mexico is particularly relevant today as NAFTA negotiations occur.

Stephen Clarkson

Laura Macdonald is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute of Political Economy at Carleton University. Her research is focused on the role of non-governmental organizations in development, global civil society, citizenship struggles in Latin America, Canadian development assistance and the political impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Among her publications are the following books: The Politics of Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean (forthcoming); North American in Question: Regional Integration in an Era of Economic Turbulence (2012) Contentious Politics in North America, Palgrave Macmillan (2009); Post-Neoliberalism in the Americas: Beyond the Washington Consensus? (2009); and Women, Democracy, and Globalization in North America: A Comparative Study (2006)

Laura Macdonald

When Will the Fiesta Start? Mexico-Canada Relations in a New North America

Laura Macdonald

North America and The Solidarity Of The Weak

Stephen Clarkson’s career began as a student of Soviet politics and his dissertation concerned. The politics of his own country, Canada, and he was part of the group of left nationalists who founded the “new Canadian political economy,” he retained a strong interest in the world and moved beyond the sometimes parochial concerns of that approach and its sometimes single-minded focus on Canada’s relationship with the superpower to the south, the United States. The signing of NAFTA in 1994, which brought Mexico into a close relationship with both Canada and the United States, led to an important shift in his focus toward comparative regionalism. He also developed a deep appreciation and knowledge of Mexico and contributed important insights to Canada’s relationship with that other “periphery” as he termed both countries.

While always clear-eyed and somewhat skeptical about the possibilities for cooperation between Canada and Mexico, he remained hopeful about the possibility to “diffuse American preponderance through a solidarity of the weak.” (Clarkson 2004, n.p., my emphasis). In the current conjuncture, this possibility remains more important than ever. While early phases of the Trump presidency showed Canada and Mexico somewhat predictably retreating into their own corners to deal with his disruptive influence, more recently the two countries seem to be moving toward a closer alliance. What can Stephen’s thinking tell us about the possibilities of cooperation between the two weaker partners in the NAFTA alliance in the face of a Trump presidency, and can they collectively achieve some shared objectives in the face of the Trump onslaught?

In this paper I will first examine Clarkson’s thinking about the nature of the Canada-Mexico relationship within the broader North American region, how it changed over time, and then will examine what his thinking tells us about the possibilities and perils of partnership between the two peripheries and the future of North America. For all the talk we’ve had of “three amigos,” the disparities and asymmetries of the relationship have seriously undermined regional cooperation even before the arrival of Trump.

The Disproportionate Power of the Hegemon in the North American Region

Clarkson began his study of the Canada-US relationship as a young academic caught up in the public outrage against the war in Vietnam. This deep moral commitment led to the publication of An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada (1968). In it, along with fellow contributors to the volume, he argued passionately for an independent voice for Canada, advocating not independence for its own sake or an idealized notion of the Canadian nation, but in order to spur the country to promote a more egalitarian and just social order both abroad and at home. He did not view the Canadian past in a rosy, idealized fashion, referring approvingly to David Wolfe’s description of the Canadian case as “bastard Keynesianism,” and to Jane Jenson’s reference to “permeable Fordism,” “whose bargain between business and labour leaders excluded other social forces” (Clarkson 2001: 503).

He also objected to the doom and gloom he perceived among some intellectual approaches to understanding the shift from a world of nation-states to the “post-sovereign” or “post-Fordist” order. He retained an optimism of the will. I argue, however, that he did remain a nationalist in that his ontological understanding of the global system rested upon the nation state as a still fundamental actor, even if its powers might be constrained by other actors, including supranational forms of governance like the World Trade Organization, and multinational corporations (see Clarkson 2001). And this position led him to reject the idea that NAFTA represented a “world region” in the sense that Europe was (a position that would also disqualify almost every other region from that terminology).
Clarkson’s approach also emerged out of the practice of teaching. In a 1972 article, he lamented the lack of social science courses on the Canada-U.S. relationship, caused by the lack of serious literature, of appropriate conceptual tools, and the “continentalism” of the Canadian scholarly community (referring here to the role of Europe and then the United States as the site of “professional finishing schools”). He devoted much of his career to the task of developing a body of analysis and adequate conceptual and theoretical tools to understanding that relationship, not just for analytical purposes but to help develop a Canadian academic community as a “motor of national development” (1972: 271).

Once the Canada-U.S. FTA was followed by the NAFTA, which included Mexico, his intellectual approach shifted and it can be argued that unlike most students of the agreement, he approached the three partners as deserving equal attention. With Maria Banda, he recognized that despite the fact that both “peripheries” faced a common challenge in their relationship to the partner in NAFTA, the United States, each continued to view their own problems separately “since the evolution of scholarship on Canada’s and Mexico’s place in the North American continent had long proceeded in its own two vacuums” (2004, n.p.). Because of the differences in the two countries’ historical and cultural origins, their commonalities did not become clear until the signing of NAFTA. Even then few analysts followed his path in systematically examining these commonalities as well as differences. These commonalities rested on the nature of their relationship with their common neighbour. Both countries had struggled with their relationship with the continental hegemon and world superpower for many years, but had struggled alone, failing to overcome those historical, linguistic, economic and cultural differences.

Neoliberals (who he insisted on referring to as neoconservatives) view FTAs as based on an equal playing field, in which all parties will benefit even if inevitably there will be some individual winners and losers. In contrast to neoliberal approaches, Clarkson emphasized the asymmetries and imbalances that prevailed in NAFTA. Based on his reading of history, and contra Trump, Clarkson argued (with Mildenberger) that the United States benefited enormously from its relationship with its weaker partners in terms of its wealth, domestic security, and international influence (2011: 247). In Uncle Sam and Us, he argues that “NAFTA was carefully designed to prevent any form of continental governance. …CUFTA and NAFTA do indeed represent a sea change for the two peripheral members of North America. Far from producing a system of continental governance in which Mexico and Canada would have had some influence their texts have reconstituted American hegemony in the form of an economic rule book that establishes an unevenly liberalized market and a set of supraconstitutional constraints on the policy-making options of both Canada and Mexico” (2002, 41-42).

Asymmetry The Fundamental Imbalance

In stark contrast to the uninformed rhetoric of Trump and his populist allies, Clarkson shows clearly that NAFTA was not a “a catastrophic trade deal for the United States” but rather a highly asymmetrical arrangement whose design the hegemon, the U.S., was able to dominate, and which drew much more benefit than its two weaker partners, Canada and Mexico. Nevertheless, his methodological nationalism may lead him to underestimate the harmful impact of the agreement on workers and marginalized groups in the United States – not that he did not recognize this impact, but it was not his main area of interest.

In a prescient discussion of the situation we soon might face, he noted that the asymmetry of the relationship comes out perhaps most clearly in the prospect of abrogation: “De facto asymmetry characterizes NAFTA’s formally symmetrical clause defining how any ‘party’ can abrogate the agreement: it needs only to give its partners six months notice of its intention. The threat of abrogation has a very different weight in the hands of Washington than in those of Ottawa or Mexico City. American interests would be affected – but not radically so – if Canada or Mexico defected from NAFTA. Disaster would be the assumed impact on either of the peripheral states should the United States abrogate. Following their virtually complete integration in the continental economy, they would be forced to their knees if Washington threatened to terminate its participation in the agreement, a technique it used when it forced Hawaii to join the United States late in the nineteenth century” (2002: 41).

Clarkson advocated for a systematic comparison of the situation of the two weaker countries partly for analytical reasons, but also for political reasons, since the possibility of constructing a “solidarity of the weak” represented an important (perhaps only) tool for counteracting the disproportionate power of the United States in the agreement. He was, however clear-eyed about the obstacles to such cooperation.

In addition to the asymmetry that characterizes the North American region, he also recognized the fundamental “imbalance” – the discrepancy between the US-Canada relationship and the US-Mexico one. In Does North America Exist he asks whether this discrepancy is being diminished “as the two peripheral countries become more similar in their US relations” (18). In particular he focuses on the possibility that “the development of the third North American bilateral has helped Mexico to become more like its northern counterpart and so reduce the imbalance with Canada of its periphery-centre relationship.” He also asks whether North America has evolved away from its origins as essentially “two separate bilateral relationships to a more trilateral space” (19). I think he is saying no to the second question but yes (somewhat) to the first one, and that the current situation seems to point to the possibility of greater convergence between the two peripheral partners.

Canada and Mexico – Toward a Partnership of the Weak?

In Chapter 18 of Does North America Exist, Clarkson focuses directly on the development of the “third bilateral” relationship, that between Canada and Mexico. He begins with a recognition that a feature of the “old North America” (pre-NAFTA, even though Mexico was then still geographically part of the continent) was “Canada’s manifest disinclination – in terms of both economic self-interest and intellectual curiosity – to connect with Mexico. The opposite was equally true: even though Mexico’s exports to Canada were considerable, its political and cultural connections were minimal.” (2008: 417).

This lack of mutual knowledge or interest is developed more extensively by other scholars, including our mutual friend, María Teresa Gutiérrez-Haces. In Los Vecinos del Vecino (The Neighbours of the Neighbour), Gutiérrez-Haces traces the way in which the character of the Mexican and Canadian states have been modified as a result of the relationship with their neighbour, the United States. She examines how “the two semiperipheries of the United States, represented by Canada and Mexico, have responded in a parallel, sometimes simultaneous, and on numerous occasions inconsistent fashion, to the U.S. neighbourhood” (2015: 14, my translation).
Canada was initially alarmed about Washington’s decision to agree to Mexico’s request to enter into an FTA that would threaten Canada’s privileged access to the U.S. market, and decided to agree to a trilateral agreement in a defensive move to protect its hard-won gains in the earlier negotiations. Clarkson elaborates on how Canadian and Mexican officials slowly began to overcome their mutual disinterest as they first negotiated the NAFTA agreement, and after the agreement came into force senior officials interacted and got to know each other more (Clarkson 2008: 418). Economic interaction also increased fairly rapidly, although Mexico still represented a tiny market for Canada.

At the same time, the two countries continued to view each other as rivals for U.S. affections, and Mexico was concerned about Canadian multilateral involvement in promoting international human rights in the late 1990s (419). Despite occasional opportunities for collaboration, Canadian diplomats “resisted being associated in US politicians’ minds with a Mexico that translated politically as illegal immigration and narco-traffic”. (420). Canada also rebuffed the proposals of the first democratically elected Mexican president Vicente Fox, who in 2000 pushed for a deepening of the North American partnership to promote greater investment in Mexican development (421).

According to Clarkson, the September 11, 2001 attacks changed North America considerably because of the effects of U.S. (over)reaction to those attacks on the bilateral relationship between Canada and Mexico. Even though there was no increase in trilateral forms of consultation, let alone new continental institutions, the crisis led both Canada and Mexico to recognize their common dilemmas. And the two countries’ foreign policies converged in opposing the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.

One sign of increased cooperation was the creation of the Canada-Mexico Partnership (CMP) in 2004 (based on the model of the 2003 US-Mexico “Partnership for Prosperity”). Five working groups were established on the topics of urban housing, sustainable cities, human capital, competitiveness, and agribusiness. Copying the structure of the US-Mexico Partnership for Prosperity, each working group was headed by one representative from government and one from “civil society” (normally the private sector) from each country. The groups operate in a non-transparent fashion, closed to observers.

As a result, they are hard to evaluate, but, according to Clarkson, appear to be excessively bureaucratic and “oriented to do little more than help the Canadian private sector drum up some business in Mexico” (425). Nevertheless, they contributed to increased interaction between government and business elites from the two countries. Clarkson also discusses the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, which is viewed in a highly positive fashion by both countries, despite criticisms that have been raised by academics and civil society organizations.

Overall, then, by the late 2000s, levels of interaction and limited coordination had been built between the two countries, even if the relationship was still overshadowed by the other two bilaterals – between the US and Canada on the one hand and the US and Mexico on the other. Clarkson judged at this point that this pattern of interaction had “helped Mexico reduce the asymmetry of its relationship with the United States and so diminish the imbalance of the two prime North American bilaterals. With North America’s peripheral members having developed an independent relationship of their own, it is clear that the continent’s governance is more than just a sum of their two relationships with the system’s hegemony”(434).

Constructing The Center Periphery Dynamic- ‘The Two Davids’

However in order to overcome centrifugal tendencies, the periphery could “play a special role in rebuilding the continent’s ‘regionness’ and so constructing US power itself”. This would require change on the part of the United States, but would also require Canadians to sacrifice. Canadians should “accept their own responsibility – and long-term self-interest – in helping Mexico break out of its vicious circles of corruption, criminality, and social disintegration” (Clarkson and Mildenberger 2011: 282); and Mexico itself, as this passage indicates, would have to embark on a difficult project of social, economic and political change.

In Dependent America, Clarkson and Mildenberger decry the fact that under the Harper government, Canada did exactly the opposite of taking responsibility for the situation Mexico faces. Instead, “Canada has played its own part in breaking down whatever trilateral solidarity NAFTA originally represented. Because it feared that its influence in Washington was contaminated by being associated with Mexico, Ottawa has taken pains to turn its back on Mexico. Openly, it instituted offensive visa requirements on Mexican travellers to Canada. Privately, it expressed reticence for a continental trilateralism that would link itself with Mexico in Washington’s eyes. Although the political, economic, and military conditions that had sustained Canada’s cordial transnational political culture with the United States have long since eroded, the Harper government is bent on resurrecting the two countries’ special relationship.”

They thus recognize that in order to break down the region’s disparities, the two “Davids” need to move beyond their differences (without ignoring their different economic, social, and political situations), and learn to work together. And in another prescient passage they warn: “The North American periphery has been Uncle Sam’s gold-laying goose for as long as most can remember. It would make an ironic epitaph for the United States’ hegemonic decline if alienating its most valuable and cultivated foreign asset accelerated its self-induced fall” (272). While Clarkson might not mourn the decline of U.S. power, which Trump’s pitfalls and machinations seem to be accelerating, he also recognized that the collateral effects on the former empire’s neighbours would be devastating.
What does a broad political economy perspective, that incorporates historical structures of oppression and is attuned to the asymmetries of the existing North American region contribute to understanding our current situation? And what can Canada and Mexico do to mitigate the damaging effects of Trump’s actions on their individual and mutual interests?

Trump, North America and Canadian Political Economists – “I told you so”

First, Canadian political economists are entitled to say: “I told you so”! While neoliberals continued to trumpet the clear benefits of free trade (without open borders) for decades, against substantial evidence to the contrary, political economists like Clarkson warned against the potentially devastating impact of the free trade agenda on the lives of ordinary citizens of the region. Although perhaps none of us could have foreseen the exact form blowback might take in the politics of the hegemon, it was not difficult to see that growing inequality would threaten the social contract on which Canada and the United States had built their (limited) versions of Fordism.
And in the case of Mexico, the threats of NAFTA and other neoliberal policies adopted by neoliberal technocrats since the early to mid-1980s were also not difficult to identify, even if few could have predicted the wave of deadly violence that the country has suffered since President Felipe Calderón unleashed his war on drugs in a bid for legitimacy after his closely contested electoral “win” in 2006 over leftist candidate Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador.

And secondly, Clarkson’s analysis indicates the importance of an alliance of the two peripheries in response to the threat they each face in light of the Trump threat to rip up NAFTA, and other threats Trump has wielded against Mexico and Mexicans in the United States in particular.

The instinct of Canadian leaders (and many Canadians) is to distance themselves from Mexico’s problems and insist on the continued relevance of Canada’s supposed “special relationship” with the United States, a notion which, as Clarkson implied, was long obsolete.
This instinct was on display before Trump came to power when Stephen Harper imposed the visa requirement on Mexico, our NAFTA partner, in 2009. This move seemed to defy economic and political logic, since Mexico was one of the few countries where Canada could possibly expect to see significant economic prospects of diversification away from the declining U.S. economy at that moment. Most Canadian economic elites criticized this decision. In 2010, Canada also placed Mexico on a list of “designated countries of origin,” as part of Bill C11 – the “Balanced Refugee Reform Act”. This move suggested that Mexico was a country that was not producing legitimate refugee claimants, in defiance again of logic and evidence, given that country’s high levels of violence, serious record of human rights abuse and widespread impunity.

In the process, Canadian officials shifted from justifying these moves in terms of Mexican “queue jumpers” and “bogus claims,” to linking them in a xenophobic fashion to fears of criminality spreading to Canada as a result of Mexicans’ unrestricted access to the country (Gabriel and Macdonald 2014). This decision of the Harper government caused enormous shock and disappointment among Mexicans at all levels of society, who were accustomed to thinking of Canada as a remote, but friendly partner, and less racist than the United States. One op ed in El Universal, Mexico’s leading newspaper, for example, asked, “How to explain such a clumsy measure as the visas for Mexicans? It is an inefficient decision, since it corrected a relatively small problem by causing one of greater dimensions….[Harper] tried to confuse Mexicans by claiming that a North American trusted traveller program would be adopted. This doesn’t mean eliminating the visas. Furthermore, lacking solid arguments, immediately on returning to Canada he linked the problem of the visas with the incapacity of Mexico to control illegal migration – to Canada? – and even with problems derived from organized crime. This shift in his discourse is at least negative and ultimately counterproductive” (Reyes Heroles 2014, our translation, cited in Gabriel and Macdonald 2014).

The result was a diplomatic showdown and the decision of Harper to postpone and eventually cancel the North American Leaders Summit, scheduled to be held in Canada in 2015, partly because of the tension with Mexico. The deterioration of the relationship between the two peripheries thus contributed to sidelining the entire North America agenda in this period.

The Trudeau Rebuilding Exercise: Summitry and Lifting The Visa Requirement

In contrast, when Justin Trudeau came to office in 2015, one of his main goals was to “renew and repair our relationships with our North American partners”. The Liberal Party election platform stated: “For the past decade, Stephen Harper has led a government that is increasingly partisan, suspicious, and hostile when dealing with our closest neighbours: the United States and Mexico. We will end this antagonism and work with our partners to advance our shared interests. As a first step, we will immediately lift the Mexican visa requirement that unfairly restricts travel to Canada, and commit to rescheduling and hosting a new trilateral leaders’ summit with the United States and Mexico.” (https://www.liberal.ca/realchange/the-united-states-and-mexico/).

Trudeau made good on this promise by hosting the North American Leaders Summit in June 2016 (where his bro-mance with both of his North American counterparts was highlighted for public relations purposes) and lifting the visa requirement for Mexicans in December 2016.

In addition, in October 2016, then-Foreign Affairs minister Stéphane Dion met with his Mexican counterpart, Claudia Ruiz Massieu, Secretary of Foreign Affairs, in the first Canada-Mexico High-Level Strategic Dialogue The meeting was designed to advance on commitments made during Peña Nieto’s state visit to Canada and to promote cooperation in areas such as “cooperation in security and student mobility, best practices in consular management and increasing prosperity for Canadians and Mexicans.” Dion and Ruiz Massieu also discussed the political situations in Colombia, Venezuela and Haiti, reflecting increased willingness to coordinate foreign policy positions on issues in the hemisphere.

They also announced the creation of an annual bilateral dialogue on human rights, reinitiated an annual dialogue on multilateral and global issues, and established a high-level task force bringing together various government departments to address challenges within the extractive sector in Mexico. The creation of the human rights dialogue was especially significant as it displayed the Canadian government’s recognition of the need for serious and open discussion of the many human rights issues facing Mexico, and the Mexican government’s willingness to discuss these sensitive issues with Canadian counterparts, at least behind closed doors.
The election of Donald Trump in November 2016 ended these gradual signs of improvement of the North American relationship. Trump’s rhetoric represented an attempt to re-assert U.S. hegemony in the region and the world. The rhetoric was particularly hostile toward Mexico, with threats to “build a wall” and to make Mexico pay for it, the threat of deportation of 11 million undocumented migrants (and the attendant impact of the drop in remittances), about 5 million of whom are Mexicans, the threat of a border adjustment tax, and the threat to rip up NAFTA. All represented blows to Mexico’s economic and political stability and national pride represented most vividly perhaps in the online ripostes of former President Vicente Fox. The peso hit a record low of 22.03 to the dollar, pressured by concern over a potential trade war between the United States and Mexico.

The economic implications for Mexico are disastrous if even some of these threats are enacted. One Mexican analyst predicted that if Trump fulfills his campaign promises we could see a fall of 4.9% of GDP in the first year of his mandate. These economic problems would aggravate long-standing economic problems with the Mexican economy – the country has experienced low levels of growth since NAFTA took force and poverty and inequality rates remain extremely high.

In response to these threats, the Liberal government initially appeared to retreat to Canada’s long-standing default position, which is to prioritize the U.S. market. Dion was replaced by former trade minister Chrystia Freeland, who was given responsibility for U.S. trade relations and the NAFTA file. On her list of “top priorities” in her mandate letter was to “maintain constructive relations with the United States, Canada’s closest ally and most important economic and security partner”. Dion had been told in his mandate letter to both improve relations with the U.S. “and strengthen trilateral North American cooperation with the United States and Mexico” (MacCharles 2017).

The Canadian Pivot Betting On The Canada US Relationship Most of All

Freeland was apparently selected because of her strong connections in the United States and the perception that the cerebral Dion would not make a good negotiator. The Trudeau government also launched a campaign to make connections with the Trump team, especially with Trump’s influential son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and mobilized a group of well-connected Canadians like former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, to try to get the ear of the new U.S. administration to convince them they had little to gain from picking a fight with Canada. There was much talk of “throwing Mexico under the bus” (Carmichael 2017). Although Freeland stated after taking on her new position that Canada supported NAFTA as a trilateral agreement and had spoken with Mexican colleagues, senior officials were quoted as saying there was no intention of creating a common front against the U.S. over NAFTA since this could bring heat onto Canada (Ljunggren 2017).

A January 24th, 2017 Reuters article quoted government sources on the sidelines of a cabinet retreat who stated that Canada would focus on its own bilateral relationship with the U.S. and would not step in to protect Mexico from being targeted: “We love our Mexican friends. But our national interests come first and the friendship comes second,” The same sources stated Canada and Mexico had little in common: “Trump is unhappy about the large U.S. deficit with Mexico and has promised to punish firms with manufacturing bases there.” Another source quoted in the same article stated: “Our negotiating positions are totally different. Mexico is being hung out of a skyscraper window by its feet,” (Ljunggren 2017).

Former Canadian ambassador to the U.S. under Brian Mulroney and NAFTA negotiator Derek Burney has been called upon to provide advice to the Trudeau government on the current situation. Burney told Maclean’s Evan Solomon (2017) that Canada should immediately abandon its relationship with Mexico: “We should not indulge in ridiculous posturing – like getting together with Mexico to defend our interests, when Canada has very different economic interests than Mexico. It is a fundamental error to conflate them.” Trump appeared to be engaging in “divide and conquer” rhetoric by talking about merely “tweaking” the relationship with Canada while engaging in fierce attacks on Mexico that led to the cancellation of the planned visit of President Peña Nieto to Washington.

Mexicans were certainly not oblivious to the Trudeau government’s wavering commitment to its NAFTA partner. Prominent Mexican academic and media commentator Denise Dresser published a blistering op ed (2017) in the Globe and Mail, which stated that despite the presence of many Canadian companies in Mexico, “Mexico has never been part of Canadians’ mental map. It remained a distant, unknown, uninteresting place, rarely covered by the media, rarely part of the conversation.” And since Mexico became Trump’s “whipping boy,” she noted with disappointment the “weighty silence” of Trudeau, Freeland and Canadians in general about the depiction of Mexicans and the idea that Canada would dump Mexico and negotiate a bilateral FTA with Washington: “But today, we are disappointed and with good reason. It seems that Canada is compassionate, but on a case-by-case basis. It appears that Canada extolls its inclusive identity, but when push comes to shove, that identity is not tied to North America or to Mexico. Canada has the right to renegotiate NAFTA on its own terms, to ignore the plight of displaced and persecuted Mexicans. It can even turn a blind eye to the recently discovered mass grave in the southern state of Veracruz, with 250 victims of the country’s continuing violence.

But please, at the very least, don’t wrap yourselves in the flag of moral self-righteousness. Canada’s treatment of Mexico reveals the country as it truly is: a place not that different from the United States, where interests matter more than principles, where interests are more important than ideals. And please remember the next time you open the door to a Syrian, you just slammed it in the face of a Mexican.”

Is Canada Dumping Mexico?

Former Mexican foreign minister Andrés Rozental (2017) also denounced the strategy of dumping Mexico: “The Trump presidency should bring Mexico and Canada much closer together, not tear us apart. Whatever trade or investment measures the U.S. applies to our country may end up harming Canada as well and destroying the competitive advantages that the North American value chain has brought since NAFTA came into force 23 years ago.”

Other long-time NAFTA analysts and advocates like Colin Robertson have urged the Canadian government to establish common cause with Mexico, expressing the view that Canada could not avoid experiencing collateral damage with any Trump administration protectionist measures against our NAFTA partner, even if Canada was not the main target. John Weekes, Canada’s chief negotiator for NAFTA, responded to suggestions that he had received that Canada should pre-emptively pull out of NAFTA, reverting to the 1988 Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement, to distance itself from Mexico. “I understand the psychology,” They think the Trump administration sees Canada as good guys, “and the Mexicans as a bunch of rapists,” so we can do better without them. “But we don’t know what the hell [the U.S.] will propose…What’s the advantage in acting?” (Clark 2017).

Former Canadian ambassador to Washington, Michael Kergin, stated, “He’s certainly got Mexico in his sights but it’s a three-way agreement. What hits Mexico will inevitably have an impact on us.” Similarly, former CUFTA negotiator Gordon Ritchie stated, “If barriers are put up against Mexican imports into the United States, we would be affected because of supply chains” (Freeman 2017). Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Makers Association of Canada claimed that the “sentiment ‘we can do this bilaterally’ will damage the prospects for the auto sector, which relies on trilateral relationships and [product] flows” (Fife 2017).
These reactions suggest that Canadian elites recognize that North America is indeed a region, however dysfunctional, and that any disruption to one of the “prime bilaterals,” in Clarkson’s terms, would seriously affect the other. In any case, it appears that the Trudeau government realized that its early reaction was short-sighted. As well, a month later, in the light of the chaos and ineffectiveness of the Trump regime, it appeared that standing beside Mexico was not as risky as it had initially thought. On February 21, 2017, Freeland assured Mexico that Canada would stand beside Mexico and would not seek a bilateral deal with the U.S. Freeland phrased this as a technical response to the nature of NAFTA: “…we very much recognize that NAFTA is a three-country agreement, and if there were to be any negotiations, those would be three-way negotiations,” even if some issues would be discussed with the United States on a bilateral basis.

Trade minister François-Philippe Champagne reiterated in a visit to Mexico in March that “NAFTA is a three-nation agreement. So the way to renegotiate a three-nation agreement is on a trilateral basis”. Nevertheless, when push comes to shove, it is possible that Canada may revert to its bilateralist impulse if Canada and Mexico are unable to agree on negotiating positions, or if Trump insists on punishing Mexico while somehow exempting Canada from protectionist measures.

The Clarkson Legacy

Stephen Clarkson has left us – too early – but has left behind a rich body of analysis that will help us interpret the monumental challenges we face as a country and a region. There is much to be learned from his work about the limitations of the NAFTA model and what measures states and leaders can and should adopt to achieve a better neighbourhood. As I have discussed in this short essay, despite his nationalist political leanings, he was an early and consistent internationalist in his intellectual interests. Nowhere was this more evident than in his treatment of the Canada-Mexico relationship. The emergence of the Trump challenge has heightened both the insecurities and vulnerabilities of both countries, and the importance that they work together.

Clarkson was highly critical of the anachronistic and close-minded tendencies of Canadian leaders who reflexively tend to shy away from the Mexican liaison. Most of his work focused on the actions wise Canadian leaders could take to improve our country’s position, but he viewed Mexico as an inevitable and necessary partner in limiting the power of the U.S. hegemon in the North American region. Unlike some government and business spokespersons who also advocate working with Mexico, he also recognized that in order to build a healthy region Mexico needs to undertake tough reforms to address the problems of inequality, poverty, corruption and violence that afflict that nation. Moving away from the neoliberal model that Mexico has embraced since the mid-1980s is a fundamental first step toward that objective, even though such a shift would not be welcomed by business elites.

References
Ayres, Jeffrey and Laura Macdonald. 2012. “Introduction,” in Jeffrye Ayres and Laura Macdonald, eds. North America in Question: Regional Integration in an Era of Economic Turbulence. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 3-32.

Clarkson, Stephen “Reform from Without versus Reform from Within:NAFTA and the WTO’s Role in Transforming Mexico’s Economic http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~clarkson/publications/Reform%20from%20Without%20versus%20Reform%20from%20Within%20-%20NAFTA%20and%20the%20WTO’s%20Role%20in%20Transforming%20Mexico’s%20Economic%20System.pdf

The following is a contribution in the blog series on the exceptional contribution of Stephen Clarkson to Canada. Stephen Clarkson died in 2016.

This piece is by Louis W. Pauly who is the J. Stefan Dupré Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto. He is cross-appointed to the faculty of the Munk School of Global Affairs. His publications include twelve books with his most influential work focusing on the politics of global finance, economic crisis management, and multinational corporate structure and strategy.

Stephen Clarkson’s Great Transformation
Louis W. Pauly

From Innisland to Polanyi

Stephen had a complicated relationship with a country that had changed dramatically during his lifetime. He was a 68er, who came from what would have accurately been described as the elite of his generation in what used to be called Upper Canada. Even if they hardly appreciated it at the time, the members of that group had inherited the rapidly expanding Canadian political economy of the post-war years. That economy was somewhere between Innis’ commodity-based dominion of the British Empire and the emerging continental production system of our own time. Stephen learned to like neither—despite being a prime beneficiary of both. Like Abe Rotstein, Mel Watkins, and his friend Daniel Drache, he yearned for a relatively more autonomous, prosperous, and egalitarian country—a country different from the late-imperial one that had benefited him at Upper Canada College, Trinity College, and Rhodes’ Oxford.

Needless to say, the nationalism born of that yearning, that aspiration, was complex.
The frustration created by the gap between aspiration and reality defined Stephen and his generation. That generation truly lived through a great transformation. No wonder they were inspired by Polanyi! They were born in Innis-land. They grew old in the land of the continental supply-chain, a land that seemed destined to be ever more deeply integrated into a financial and innovation system grounded in political structures south of the border. The best of both worlds? Some say so. But Stephen rejected that rosy view. He saw only a transfer of colonial allegiance. In the days of Trump, who can plausibly argue that he was wrong to hope for something better, something more noble.

Personally, I’m glad that Stephen did not have to witness the abomination currently unfolding in the USA. He might have liked it too much. It would have taken away more of the shades of gray that lie in between the urge for Canadian autonomy and the reality of deepening social and economic integration. It would not have led him to optimism.
The Legacy of ’68 and Stephen’s Elite Past

One thing, though, always did leave a smile on Stephen’s face. He loved his students, and he loved teaching them about Canada in a changing world. Of course, he had some unfair advantages. At the end of every year, he would visit the undergraduate office in the Political Science Department. There he would find out who were the top undergraduates finishing third year. He would gather their names and addresses, and over the course of the summer he would write personal letters to them. The letters invited them to register in his famous fourth-year political economy seminar. Ah, despite the legacy of ‘68, the old instincts persisted! He wanted to work with the best, he wanted to shape the leaders of the next generation, albeit now a truly multicultural generation. And he did work with them. During his last decade, he found ways to take his seminar-students—the survivors of a rigorous selection process—abroad. Every year, he led them on serious research missions, which would always lead to a collaborative publication. And despite his stated disdain for the glittering prizes of his own elite past, he would quietly but exceedingly diligently work very hard to help the brightest of his students win Rhodes, Commonwealth and other prestigious graduate scholarships.

For present purposes, it is quite interesting to note the research theme that his students and he pursued in those seminars during his last years. It was the same theme that continued to win him distinguished research grants in Canada and Germany—so much for the idea of retirement, which he detested! The theme was comparative continentalism. It was not exactly clear where that research was going, but let me take some guesses and put it into the longer term context of contemporary political economy.
Stephen’s doctoral dissertation dabbled in Marxist thought. In retrospect, it can be hard to distinguished from a critique of hyper-liberalism: a global division of labour, the rise of boundary-spanning markets beyond the control of nation-states, the inherent value of labour inexorably usurped by capital, the inexorable rise of an impoverishing system that in the end would surely collapse. Alas, that nightmare abated in the post-war years and especially in the wake of rising nationalism in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the Vietnam War rendered the prospect of globalism seriously problematic, for here was a misguided venture opposed by national and international capital, the defense industry notwithstanding, but pursued to its hideous conclusion by a hegemonic state that could no longer calibrate its own fundamental interests but could indeed control markets.

Clarkson’s Pan Canadian Nationalism: One of His Red Lines

In its wake locally, though, came not Stephen’s dream of a new pan-Canadian nationalism, or Abe Rotstein’s and Mel Watkins’ infrastructure for an independent Canada. No, in its wake came the Auto Pact, the FTA and then NAFTA. And during the same era, Canada itself almost fell apart with the Quebec referenda of 1980 and 1995. Stephen was not happy. Eventually, his unhappiness found a focal point in the Investor-State Dispute Settlement Mechanism at the heart of NAFTA, a structure that seemed to lock Canada into a single continental economic system with an accountability flaw at its heart. The US Congress still held the ultimate whip-hand, but Canadians had no representatives in that ultimate decision-making body. There is no doubt that had he survived to the present moment, his attention would have been riveted on this particular, and particularly ironic, aspect of the NAFTA renegotiation demanded by Trump.

For Stephen, I think, whether one’s political economy priors have Marxist, liberal or even Gilpin-style realist roots, the resulting research questions today are three: was the North American experience of transformation and trauma in traditional authority relations happening elsewhere? If so, was the direction of change toward fragmentation or integration? And what were the most consequential political reactions locally?

Stephen’s research guided by these questions was still underway when he died, but a couple of books had come out along the way and many papers were in the pipeline. I do not know where his unfinished magnum opus would have landed on these questions. But my guess would be as follows.

The Terrible Spectre of a Contested Future

Continentalist ideologies remain ascendant in the real world of political economy. Who can doubt the existence of a US-centered North and South American economy—linked by finance, goods and services, drugs, labour mobility, and a US-defined rule of law? Who is not asking him or herself right now if that regional economy is being matched by a rapidly evolving German-centered Europe? (By the way, I’m sure Stephen did sense that during his last years; he was as attracted by German culture and by the post-war German idea of the social market economy. Note in this regard that by his own request half of his ashes are now buried in Germany.) And finally, who is not fascinated these days by the implications of China’s rise in Asia?

By the time he left us, though, I think Stephen was aware of the fragility at the core of each of these continental economies, the continuing, even deepening, linkages across them, and perhaps most importantly the ideological weakness of continentalism. Unlike most variants of nationalism, it seems not to call forth any potentially constructive passion. But around the world, it certainly does seem to inspire a spirit of passionate resistance. And thus might Stephen have concluded.

His students, though, could not stop there. For they had begun to see clearly the immensity of the challenges in front of their generation. The problems of collective action looming—from climate change to financial instability to refugee-generating conflicts around the world—could not be avoided. If the nation-state was no longer up to the task of problem-solving, if nascent continental polities were incoherent, if supranational institutions were absent or ineffective, that only serves to clarify things. If they remain inspired by Stephen Clarkson, they will take that clarity as a challenge, the starting point for new and urgent research.

If Stephen had lived long enough to be inspired by that next generation and to write yet another book of his own, he might have looked to his past work for an appropriate title. He might have called it “Canada and the Global Challenge.”

The following is a contribution in the blog series on the exceptional contribution of Stephen Clarkson to Canada. Stephen Clarkson died in 2016.

This piece is by Andrew F. Cooper, who is a Professor at the Balsille School of International Affairs and the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. He is also the Director of the Centre for the Study of Rapid Global Change. Andrew Cooper is the author of 9 books including Group of Twenty (2013) Internet Gambling Offshore (2011) and Celebrity Diplomacy

Stephen Clarkson’s ‘Foundational Text’ on Canadian Foreign Policy

Andrew F. Cooper

Canada and The World Then

We collectively miss Stephen Clarkson but our individual intellectual understanding and appreciation of his work are quite different. Stephen was idiosyncratic, in the sense that it is difficult to typecast him too tightly via a particular framework although the new Canadian political economy comes closes (Cameron, 2016). He was hopeful for Canada’s future, but his analysis led him to pessimistic conclusions. He despaired about the limitations of Canada’s ‘mandarins’ (especially its diplomats) but had high expectations for both citizen based activity and some technocratic driven policy solutions. And he appreciated ‘big’ individuals in a manner rare for a political scientist, but was duly worried about the nature of that personalism, especially emerging from the US with bouts of go it alone zealousness.

To try to tease out some of these fascinating features about Stephen’s thinking with regard to Canada’s position in the world, I have gone back to what is his foundational work – his edited collection An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada? Published in 1968 this volume attracted attention not only from established academics but aspirant scholars (including myself as an undergraduate). Although I didn’t know Stephen at the time, I was intrigued and to some extent inspired by his animation of this collection.

Organizationally there is a lot about An Independent Foreign Policy that speaks to Stephen’s personality. This was not a work with one tightly controlled view. Rather it was a pluralist endeavor containing chapters by many of the big highly argumentative academics of the day (if with only a single female contributor, Pauline Jewett, a gap Stephen made up later in life with an array of female collaborations).

Substantially the topics especially in the opening section remain – in a time of Trump – highly relevant. The Myths of the Special Relationship, Quiet Diplomacy revisited, Retaliation? Confronting Uncle Sam!

Stephen’s own contributions in binding the collection together are significant in locating major points of continuity and adaptation in his later (prolific) writings. Therefore, although not as well-cited now as many of these subsequent works it is a valuable exercise to go through An Independent Foreign Policy as we remember Stephen and celebrate his contribution.

Canada’s Potential versus Structural Limitations

At the core of Stephen’s work is what he considers the Canadian conundrum, the tension between Canada’s (unrealized) potential versus the formidable structural limitations (Clarkson, 1968: x). Indeed, it was this tension that underpinned An Independent Foreign Policy.

In general mindset Stephen was an optimist. Indeed, in many ways, he was the godfather of a wave of books (many decades later) that advocated Canada go beyond its traditionally cautious and modest habits, and go big in terms of ambition. A primary example of this evolution is Jennifer Welsh’s book, At Home in the World (2004), framed by the aspiration that Canada should be a model international citizen. Another example of this ambitious construct comes from Michael Byers, of the University of British Columbia, in his Intent for a Nation (2007). The core themes of this ‘model citizen’ approach is to look to a fully post-colonial Canada, with a deep distrust for the status quo.

What is striking from the start then is a rejection of the positioning of Canada as a quintessential middle power, at least how that framework has been identified and utilized by practitioners and mainstream academics. While of course he comes back to the middle power notion later on in his career, he never embraces the middle power model in terms of its familiar diplomatic toolkit.

The Search for Alternatives

Nor however does Stephen embrace the alternative notion that Canada is destined to be a principal or foremost power. Although this school – led initially by James Eayrs (also at University of Toronto) gained some strength by the mid-1970s, Stephen kept his distance. Stephen was extremely interested in institutions, but the institutions that grabbed his attention were almost always exclusively economic (and in large part continental) in nature. Unlike other University of Toronto colleagues (such as Bill Graham and John Kirton) he did not engage deeply in the debates about the G7/8.

What was salient to Stephen – and increasingly so after the publication of An Independent Foreign Policy – was the substance of political economy rather than the practice of diplomacy or geo-politics. In this shift we can see a fundamental split between Stephen and other key individuals that advocated a revisionist foreign policy in the mid to the late 1960s.

It is pertinent here to also note the divergence between Stephen and Lloyd Axworthy. Akin to Stephen, Axworthy departed from the established tenets of the past with considerable impatience with the static quality of Canada’s traditional middle power diplomacy. Explicitly, Axworthy wanted to liberate the middle power model from its identification with the fixed ‘order’ driven worldview of the Pearson era. This impatience was a long-standing condition, which may be traced back to Axworthy’s younger days as a critical observer of Pearson’s “worth[y]” but “grey and oh so solid” diplomacy. As neatly captured, for instance, in a series of newspaper articles that Axworthy wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press in September 1965, this sense of impatience pointed – like Stephen’s – toward diplomatic activity that was more noisy and public-oriented (Axworthy, 1965).

But the divergence between Stephen and Axworthy after the late 1960s is illuminating. Shut out of the NAFTA debates, Axworthy’s focus as minister was towards a more fluid focus on ad hoc, normative driven issue-specific coalitions of the willing. The most dynamic expressions of this narrative come on the issues of land mines, the ICC, and the advance of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) The narrative of the Axworthy doctrine puts orthodox conceptions of security and national interest on the defensive; at the same time, it is an implicit criticism of traditional Pearsonian conception of middle power diplomacy, as it regards this approach as being too slow and too cautious.

Stephen retained an interest in these sorts of diplomatic initiatives. In a 2010 talk he pointed to how the land mines and ICC initiatives were examples to how pressure from civil society could influence government (Clarkson, 2010). Yet, this was not at the heart of his concern, as he privileged less specific cases of diplomatic success but the need to address structural conditions.

Such ambition fitted into his original desire and optimistic spirit to reach Canada’s unrealized potential but also to highlight his enveloping concerns (even pessimism) that the structural constraints were simply too great. As he suggested: “These examples give some sense of how citizens have tried to correct the constitutional imbalance that is constraining the regulatory state, exacerbating global inequalities and threatening the planet’s survival as a hospitable environment for human life. But activism is not enough. If the market’s capacity to self-destruct is to be contained, governments must get in step with their citizenry to give clear priority to human emancipation” (Clarkson, 2010).

Stephen’s appreciation of the structural constraints facing Canada pushed him further into the analysis of political economy. If the Independent Foreign Policy volume was animated largely by the Vietnam war, over time it was the issue of how ‘Continentalism’ compromised the Canadian economy and constrained the Canadian state that dominated his work.

Clarkson: The North American Political Economist

Others in this collection will deal with Stephen’s association with the study of new Canadian political economy in greater depth. What I will add is above all my appreciation not only of the depth of Stephen’s knowledge but also the extent of his normative commitment on these issues. Even scholars who disagreed with Stephen acknowledge the nuanced approach that Stephen used to tease out the contours of Continentalism, and the full implications of these conditions. As rehearsed most specifically in his book 2008 Does North America Exist? Stephen revealed the highly varied nature of those contours, with some sectors, for example, water management and the steel industry, far more integrated than would be expected. In others (like intellectual property and financial services), bilateral relations and globalization are more powerful forces than regional convergences (Clarkson, 2008).

In terms of normative concerns where Stephen has had the most influence of later debates is his showcasing “Canada’s Secret Constitution” Consistently, Stephen emphasized the undemocratic manner by which NAFTA – along with the WTO – “create a new mode of economic regulation with such broad scope and such unusual judicial authority “that it entrenches certain inviolate principles or norms that are above the reach of any politician to alter.”(Clarkson, 2002).

As always with Stephen he continued to expand his intellectual horizons, moving from a concentrated focus on Canada to extended studies of the trilateral North American relationship including in considerable detail Mexico, and the comparative study of NAFTA and the European Union. In both cases not only did he tap into some valuable themes, not least the huge asymmetries among the three partners, and the absence of a European-style system in North America of multi-level governance.

Gaps in the Clarkson Oeuvre

All of this is not to leave Stephen free of criticism (although he would be quick to debate these issues). His focus on structural conditions has a mercantilist air about it, with a conflation between US state and commercial interests. As we see to some extent through the Nixon years, and more robustly at the beginning of the Trump administration, however, this connection can be broken. It is not only the asymmetry between the US and its North American partners that needs study, it is also the asymmetry between different winners and losers in the US as well as Canada and Mexico that merits attention. Stephen put a heavy weight on the ‘hollowing out’ of corporate Canada, but without the same appreciation of how corporate America has hollowed out investment and jobs in the US, leaving space open for a populist backlash. Stephen could argue that, “NAFTA cannot be blamed for the growing income inequality within the US economy [- whereas] free trade appears causally related to the various factors increasing economic disparities within Canada and Mexico” – this is not the message drummed home with considerable impact by Trump (Clarkson, 1998).

A second criticism at least for liberal internationalists is the disjunction between Stephen’s normative-oriented criticisms about NAFTA, the WTO and indeed many other institutions and the hold of the more pragmatic attitude of Canadian citizens and politicians. Dealing with the US in terms of institutions might be bad, but dealing with the US without institutions is worse. The Trump attacks on NAFTA, the WTO, and NATO brings this embedded attitude out. Whatever the difficulties of having NAFTA in place – with a US imposed Chapter 11 highly prominent in terms of policy output – are the difficulties of dealing with a unilateral ‘rogue’ US without some ‘insurance’ from increased risk of arbitrary and unfair treatment.

And finally, there is the question of the EU model as a suitable alternative design. Stephen is highly laudatory of the EU model, both in terms of “the strength of its institutions or the sophistication of its jurisprudence. Yet, no less than in North America, the process towards continental integration could be viewed by the peripheral countries as “fast but secretive, controversial, and divisive, privileging business interests and excluding social partners” (Clarkson, 1998).

All of this is not to detract from Stephen’s contribution. On the contrary, in many ways what we find with the Trump phenomenon is a reinforcement of the accuracy of many of the other themes that Stephen concentrated on. No less than when he edited An Independent Foreign Policy, it is the centrality of the US relationship to Canada that comes to the fore. When there is space – for example – in the aftermath of the Cold War Canada could downplay this relationship as it main game. But when things get tough, as in the Reagan years or with Trump the main stream dominates. So, in this sense, Stephen’s work remains a crucial guide for understanding Canada’s position in the world.

The Deficiencies of Canadian State Practice Still Haunts Us

A second major theme that comes out of An Independent Foreign Policy is an intense frustration with the bureaucracy ‘managing’ Canada’s place in the world. If the structural conditions imposed enormous constraints on Canada’s freedom of action, these limitations were exacerbated by a combination of “traditional elitism and secrecy” (Clarkson, 1968: xi). Such a culture immobilized big creative thinking and action.

As in later eras, Stephen was appreciative of some of the contextual difficulties, especially the need to work under conditions of the communications revolution. But there was a deep concern whether under any circumstances Canadian mandarins had the will to things differently beyond a crisis management approach.

This critique was another sign of Stephen’s distance from orthodox scholarship about Canadian foreign policy. For most academics up to the late 1960s celebrated Canadian diplomats and policy makers more generally for their skills.

Stephen punctured this sense of pride and image of superiority. Not for him the art of the possible, or mere problem solving. In many ways, this distaste connected with his suspicion that the functional approach in regard to institutions undersold Canada, with an onus on joining and status enhancement as opposed to a transformative ethos.

Stephen came to see Canada as a middle power in terms of its place in the hierarchy of nations (a semi-peripheral country) but he never embraced middle power diplomatic techniques. In some areas this was by omission, as there was only brief mentions of mediation as a primary focus of attention.

The main cause of contestation was on the primacy of quiet diplomacy in the Canadian repertoire. For the traditional ‘External Affairs’ mandarin this was the dominant practice in the tool kit. What was important was access and influence in Washington DC. Urges to criticize the US and US leaders should be tempered. Changes in US policy should be anticipated before they go public in an atmosphere of controversy. And there should never be the utilization of retaliation via linkage of issues.

In hindsight much of Stephen’s critique in An Independent Foreign Policy seems quite moderate. After all he played down the revolutionary dynamics. Arguing that Canada did “not need the mountain moving voluntarism of Mao. simply needs a leadership that can make it clear to the public – if not in a little Red book at least in a White Paper- what role Canada can play and how its objectives are to be achieved.” (Clarkson, 1968: 268).

Moreover, some of the changes pushed for by Stephen were coming into being albeit unevenly. One of the first things the government of Pierre Trudeau did was to start a conversation about foreign policy – a conversation that continued in a variety of structured forms in later years. Plus, we can see bursts of activity trying to do things differently in foreign policy, from the Third Option to the National Energy Program (NEP) related initiatives in the early 1980s.

Stephen was supportive of these efforts, and of course distressed when the momentum for both opening up the debate on Canadian foreign policy and the implementation of robust policies dried up first in the Mulroney years and then the Harper years. In doing so he became a key source of memory in the championing of an open autonomous foreign policy.

Yet as with any robust template for foreign policy there are points of contradiction and gaps. For the paradox of moving towards an autonomous and robust policy template in the early 1980s was that the actual policy making process reverted to the closed format that Stephen was so frustrated about in the 1960s. The only difference was that instead of a generalist elite dominating foreign policy it was now a centralizing cohort of technocrats inside central agencies.

Trudeau’s Failed Third Option: The Reagan Cowboys

The NEP shows off this problem of reconciling dialogue among Canadians and the pursuit of robust policy making. As Stephen appreciated the process of decision making was secretive not only in the context of public dialogue but bureaucratic interaction: “remov[ed] from the normal process of interdepartmental consultation..[with DEA] ‘not informed until the last moment” (Clarkson, 1982: 79).

At the same time US retaliation showed itself to be no paper tiger. With the US first Reagan administration in place retaliatory pressures increased, with the Trudeau Liberals shifting from the practices of accommodation of the past to a “complacent and superior” positon that was premised on the notion that the “Californian cowboys” needed time to learn their job (Clarkson, 1982: 32).

The hard-line position of the Reagan administration was complicated further by the fact that the Trudeau government had expected some support for a global initiative on North-South relations. Not only were these (unlikely hopes) dashed but Canada found itself under pressure from Washington’s “institutionalized and unpredictable vulnerability” a doctrine of reciprocity that pushed the Trudeau government (again to Stephen’s frustration) to seek again the “advocacy of indirect means of influence” on issues such as Cruise missile testing. As Stephen suggested – very much in the mindset of An Independent Foreign Policy– this backtracking marked “a striking resemblance to the old quiet diplomacy approach and offers as little concrete evidence of its effectiveness” (Clarkson, 1982: 282).

Where the mantra of retaliation did creep into the Canadian agenda was at the sub-national level, a domain allowing for some considerable fragmentation on issues of provincial responsibilities. This type of action was of course most recently highlighted by BC Liberal leader Christy Clark, who on the eve of the recent election pushed for retaliatory trade threats to pressure for a softwood deal: “With our ban on moving thermal coal, we have got the Americans’ attention…We aren’t going to be weaklings” (Bailey and Hunter, 2017).

Stephen’s main contribution to the debate about Canada’s own practice was as a catalyst for change in change. Arguably more than any other text An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada opened up the debate about how accepted practices had run their course. Few pushed back to defend the Department of External Affairs as the core ingredient in the making of foreign policy. And the manta of quiet diplomacy lost ground accelerated over time to new and sophisticated practices of public diplomacy and national branding designed to cushion Canada from retaliatory activities).

Nonetheless, Stephen set himself a high bar to pass in terms of wanting both an open citizen based and coherent technically sound foreign policy. As the experience of the Trudeau government showed in the early 1980s robustness commonly combines with a revised form of elitism. What is more, under the structural constraints that Stephen so ably depicted, any departure in the traditional habit by legitimizing retaliation runs risks especially in the context of an America first administration – whether Reagan or Trump.

Continentalism and Canada’s Perennial Leadership Dilemma

Arguably the main point of departure of Stephen with most of his counterparts studying political economy – or International Relations more generally – is his appreciation for not only agency but the individual agency. Although to be sure a good deal of his work focused on the structural imposed by Continentalism, space opened up over time concerning how of major individuals influenced policy making decisions.

Here it is not so much An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada that acts as the foundation for this appreciation, but arguably his earlier work on Nehru and other ‘third world’ leaders focused upon in his thesis and subsequent publication on The Soviet Theory of Development (Clarkson, 1978: 265).

As alluded to by the reference to Mao and Canadian public policy, Stephen did not show expectation in An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada for a dynamic form of personal leadership in Canadian public policy. Nonetheless, he clearly expected more in terms of leadership than what was on offer by Lester Pearson in the 1960s.

To Stephen, Pearson’s instincts for quiet diplomacy (if useful at the time of the Suez crisis) had become a weakness weighing Canadian foreign policy down. As he writes Pearson’s has turned an “unobtrusive” style of diplomacy – “tactics which lead to his own international successes in the mid 1950s into a dogma that frustrates” (Clarkson, 1968: 265).

As well rehearsed in a host of later publications, Pierre Trudeau was far more Stephen’s image of a leader. And although on many specific occasions frustrated by his actions, Pierre Trudeau was the model that Stephen used to judge other leaders right up to the time of the government of Justin Trudeau (Appel, 2015).

If he found Trudeau fascinating (and in many admirable) Stephen became just as taken up by the personality types of American leaders. An indication of this shift from structure to agency in studying Continentalism is his tile of Canada and the Reagan challenge (as opposed to the neo-conservative challenge).

NAFTA and Market Integration

As a consequence of this shift Stephen became a close observer of bilateral (and later trilateral) summits between North American leaders. In the actual benefits of these summits Stephen was ambiguous. In some appearances, he supported greater institutionalization: “it’s amazing actually to think that, given all the attention spent on NAFTA, the three heads of government don’t meet regularly. They didn’t even meet after September 11, 2001, when the borders were blockaded, which put the whole notion of NAFTA in jeopardy” (Clarkson, 2005). At the same time, though, he was as worried as other observers that such meetings could be highly problematic, animating a securitization of North America.

But the importance of Stephen’s bringing individual agency in is that he was (or could have been!) well situated to take into account new unanticipated and disruptive changes at the apex of the US political system. A major contribution of his in the 1980s was to capture the individual importance of the Reagan challenge: “Reagan was serving notice on the world that America’s decade of instability and indecision was over [with a) simplistic and self-serving moralism” (Reagan, 1982: 21).

While a topic never allowed to be elaborated upon, Stephen was early on aware of the “tsunami” like implications of a Trump victory (Metro, 2015). In a December 2015 public event in Toronto he signaled that the Trump revolution would go beyond that animated by Reagan or George W. Bush “He’s off the map, even for conservatives”. Stephen stated, adding that Trump would “create an earthquake with Canada suffering tidal wave” (Metro, 2015).

The Clarkson Legacy

From his editorship of An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada, therefore, Stephen indicated his unique attributes as a scholar and a commentator. While building on his expertise in political economy in comparative perspective, he honed in on the Canadian continental condition. Although immersed in theory of economic development, what jumps out is his eclecticism: his concern with history and his blend of an analysis of structure and over time an appreciation of big personalities, albeit not always in a positive fashion.

For all of these of reasons– and many more- Stephen stands out among Canadian intellectuals. Yet if we miss him, we can still learn from him, not the least about how to balance tough interrogation of what is happening in everyday politics and policy making with an enthusiastic expectation that we can move beyond cautious and limiting habits.

My first, second and third posts on the Ontario electricity sector described how policy and administrative decisions by different Liberal Governments gave rise to excess electricity generation with an inflated cost structure, leading to higher electricity prices. In anticipation of June 2018 elections, the Liberal Government recently implemented a costly and first-in-Canada financial scheme to fund its “Fair Hydro Plan” (FHP) to provide a short-term 17% price reduction. Given that the FHP is now a financial reality, this post focusses on the options available to a new Government with respect to both the FHP and the main driver of Ontario’s inflated cost structure, long-term contracts with independent power producers (IPPs).

-The City of Toronto has worked hard to develop good practices on the ground to address homelessness.

-But, like all of Canada’s major urban centres, it can’t properly address homelessness without substantial increases in funding from the federal and provincial governments.

This opinion piece is quite timely, as a new “national housing strategy” is expected to be unveiled by the Trudeau government later this month.

On Monday, the Calgary Homeless Foundation will be publishing a peer-reviewed report authored by Dr. Phillips. That report’s focus will be Toronto’s Streets to Homes program (a program that provides immediate access to housing to persons experiencing homelessness).

The 2017 Economic and Fiscal Update provides some detailed data (see pp. 51-53) on who will be impacted by the government’s plan to limit how much passive investment income can be earned in a private corporation.

Income from investments held in a private corporation is taxed at a lower rate than investments held by a person in a non registered account such as an RRSP or TFSA. For most small businesses, there is no incentive to save in a private corporation rather than an RRSP of TFSA.

Responding to anguished cries from small business, the vast majority of which are not impacted at all, Minister Morneau will allow $50,000 of income to be earned within a private corporation. This is equivalent to assets of more than $1 million.

The government estimates that putting a cap on private corporation investment income will affect just 3% of private corporations with investment income. But this small group of just 8,400 companies accounts for a stunning 88% of private corporation passive investment income.

Crunching the numbers shows that the affected 8,400 companies have average assets of $35.7 million.

The Department of Finance estimate that earning investment income in a private corporation instead of a personal account provides a higher annual after tax rate of return over ten years of 12.5% compared to 6.9%.

Again crunching the numbers, this means that the after tax return for the average private corporation impacted by the changes will fall from about $4.5 million to $2.5 million per year. (This depends on the details of how the new cap is to be applied, which will be in future legislation.)

Minister Morneau is entirely correct to argue that his proposed changes to taxation of passive investment income will have no impact on genuine small businesses, and are squarely aimed at a very small group of wealthy Canadians seeking an unjustifiable tax advantage.

It’s been over a week now since I challenged the authors of 5 business-friendly economic reports to a friendly wager over the future trajectory of employment in provinces that are raising their minimum wage to $15 per hour. The challenge was issued in my Globe and Mail column of October 3.

I was responding to the several business groups and business-funded think tanks that had issued several reports predicting job losses from the higher minimum wage, in the run-up to the coming vote in the Ontario legislature on the policy. I summarized some of the major flaws of the various studies: including their misreading and misapplication of recent economic research on the employment effects of minimum wages (which typically find very small, or even slightly positive, effects); their misleading arguments regarding the connection between minimum wages and poverty; and their spurious concerns about the supposedly undue pace of the increases in Ontario and Alberta (in fact, of course, business lobbyists stridently oppose higher minimum wages on any timetable).

My main concern, however, was not these methodological critiques, but rather that the headlines generated from these reports about “coming job losses” resulting from higher minimum wages were very misleading, and in fact misportrayed the reports’ actual findings. The reports generally describe an implicit counterfactual simulation relative to some base case forecast (which presumably incorporates normal ongoing employment growth). At worst, in their scenarios (even if we accept their pessimistic approach), employment would grow more slowly than would otherwise be the case. That doesn’t really mean that “jobs are destroyed by higher minimum wages.” But that is how the results were portrayed in media coverage. The scale of potential job losses in even the more negative of these studies will almost certainly be overwhelmed by normal job creation, and hence employment will continue to grow even after minimum wages are raised.

It’s important to note that this is not because of higher minimum wages (the economic research suggests that the expansionary effects of higher minimum wages through stronger consumer spending roughly balance out potential contractionary effects experienced primarily through slower business investment). I am not arguing that a higher minimum wage in and of itself creates new jobs; only that fears they will destroy jobs and reduce employment are not valid. The small effects of minimum wages (in either direction) will be overwhelmed by the other, more important determinants of employment. Meanwhile, the distributional effects of higher minimum wages (shifting income from capital to labour, and towards low-wage workers in particular) will be very positive.

To highlight this point, I challenged the authors of five different critical studies to a $500 wager (each) that total employment in the relevant province they analyzed would be higher (not lower) one year after the minimum wage is increased. To propose this wager, I have corresponded personally with the lead authors of the studies published by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, TD Bank, the C.D. Howe Institute, the Fraser Institute, and the Ontario government’s own independent Office of Financial Accountability. (That last group is in a different category from the others: it is not a business-friendly think tank but rather a government-funded body meant to provide arms-length analysis of government fiscal policy matters; its mandate apparently allows it to wade into broader economic issues like this one. I remain deeply suspicious of the FAO’s decision to wade into this particular debate, and I think there should be a broader critical discussion of its mandate and governance.) The C.D. Howe report was focused on Alberta – and hence my proposed wager is based on the change in Alberta’s employment. All the others focused on Ontario, and the bet was defined accordingly.

In my correspondence I indicated that if I won the bet, I would donate both my winnings and my original ante to the Workers’ Action Centre (the fine organization which has spearheaded the Fight for $15 in Ontario), or in the case of the Alberta study to the Fight for Fifteen network based in Calgary.

To date I have heard back from three of the five authors. Two of the authors (lead authors of the TD Bank and Ontario FAO reports) replied noting that their own research in fact indicates their expectation that total employment in Ontario will indeed grow after the minimum wage is increased (although more slowly, in their judgment, than it would have otherwise). They were understandably puzzled why I would ask them to bet against their own forecasts! The lead author of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce study sent me a pleasant but noncommittal reply, referring me to a posted response which restates their key arguments, expresses concern at “ideological” misrepresentations of their findings, and declines the proposed wager. The reply (like the original study) makes no mention as to whether the authors expect total employment in Ontario to rise or fall after the minimum wage is increased (that is, whether the job losses they expect from the minimum wage will outweigh the normal expected increase in employment). I repeated this explicit question to them in subsequent correspondence, with no reply. I should note that all three of these authors also indicated they did not think betting on an important economic issue was appropriate or ethical.

I have not yet received a reply from the authors of the Fraser Institute and C.D. Howe reports. I will update this blog post (in the Comments section below) if I have any subsequent correspondence regarding the proposed wager.

For now, this offbeat exercise has confirmed my argument in the original column that none of the minimum wage critics are actually arguing that employment is going to decline in any of the provinces lifting the minimum wage to $15. Highlighting this point – that employment growth has been relatively strong in all three provinces (Ontario, Alberta, and B.C.), and will almost certainly continue even as the minimum wage increases – is an important way of responding to the fear-mongering of the business critics.

Stephen Clarkson died early in 2016 in Freiburg, Germany and Canada lost someone very special. Stephen was a Professor in Political Science at the University of Toronto and engaged in teaching, research and writing until his death. He has contributed, in an extraordinary way, to the public understanding of Canada and North America in the 20th and 21st centuries, Europe in the 21st century, and the politics of globalization in the Western World. He was one of Canada’s leading experts on Canada/US relationships and in this, his absence is acutely felt now as we are in the midst of renegotiating NAFTA.

At the annual gathering of academics in Toronto at Congress 2017, we organized a series of panels related to Stephen Clarkson’s work. We constructed the panels with the idea of bringing together experts who work in the various areas related to what interested Stephen to understand Stephen’s impact in the area. The papers that were presented at Congress will each appear in the PEF forum. The point of the papers was not necessarily to be a comment on or critique of his work per se, but to show his influence on the entire thinking in an area of political economy, relating to issues such as the mega-trade deals, the machine politics of the Liberal and Conservative Parties, corporate influence, North American integration, and the new issues arising for regional and world politics such as the investor state dispute settlement mechanism trade court.

Stephen’s work was centered on the leading issues of the day foremost of which was the erosion of national sovereignty facing the unstoppable, far-reaching invasiveness of globalization and WTO’s complex, difficult legal culture. He authored 14 books, and edited four others.[1] He was a gifted linguist and fluent in French, Russian, Spanish, Italian and German. He could present in each of these languages (in their home countries) what many of us struggle to do in English in Canada – deliver an academic paper or lecture without notes.

He received many honours and awards – some of them the most prestigious this country can give, such as the Order of Canada. Stephen was also a gifted teacher and loved that aspect of his life. He particularly enjoyed teaching undergraduates (another departure from many colleagues). He even managed, through his charm and determination to include undergraduates on panels at Congress (the yearly gathering of Canadian academics where undergraduates are not permitted to present papers).

He has had an exceptionally productive career with a great many significant publications that have affected thinking in this country. An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada, 1968 is an edited collection, in which he wrote a chapter that presaged Trudeau’s Third Option and began his life-long concern researching the Canada’s declining importance in the global economy.

Uncle Sam and Us,: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State 2002 provides a powerful study documenting the massive reorientation of Canadian state policy, the rise of North American corporate power and the increasingly toxic role of neo-liberal ideology as a separate commanding policy space. The Big Red Machine, 2005 delved into the exercise of power, disappointments, betrayals and leadership battles of Canada’s Liberal Party, once the country’s unchallengeable hegemonic political party whose grip on power seemed unassailable at the polls despite a string of minority governments and the shift of power regionally from Quebec to the West.

These massively documented volumes are an excellent example of his vast knowledge and deeply analytical approach to Canada-US relations. Before this book, his earlier book, Canada and the Regan Challenge: Crisis in the Canadian-American Relationship, 1985 was one of the best contemporary studies of Canada/U.S. relations available from a critical Canadian perspective. His book became a classic of the new critical nationalism of English Canada of the 1980s, along with Kari Levitt’s earlier work Silent Surrender (1970), and was used extensively in universities all over the country on the asymmetrical, nuanced relationship between the two countries.

Another major initiative was to undertake a two volume magisterial study of the career, personality, ideas and exercise of power of the protean Pierre Elliot Trudeau during his decade long, tumultuous time as Prime Minister. He wrote this with his wife, at the time, Christina McCall Newman, a well-known journalist. The vibrancy of their exhaustive reckoning and biting assessment of the Trudeau years in part came from their finely-honed writing skills exemplified by their unforgettable opening line of the first volume of their biography, “He haunts us still”. Its impact also, derived from the dozens of interviews carried out in Ottawa, London and Washington about Canada’s larger than life Prime Minister who transformed modern Canada linguistically, economically and constitutionally. As these volumes showed, for many Trudeau became the ideal love-hate polarizing actor, change-agent, activist, theoretician, global celebrity with a grand federal vision for a newly constituted English Canada. In the Clarkson/McCall authoritative account we relive the nail-biting excitement and high and low drama of Canada’s constitutional wars particularly through Trudeau’s struggle against René Levesque’s and later with Lucien Bouchard’s la grande stratégy pour l’independence. Stephen and Christine won the Governor General’s medal for the first volume.

After the liberalism of the Trudeau years Canada changed, and Clarkson continued to focus on power, ideology, and state policy. In addition to his broad knowledge of Canada/US relations, Clarkson published extensively on North American political economy along with a proliferation of studies and reports, with a special emphasis on NAFTA and its implications for Canada and Mexico. While working on issues related to free trade, he became fluent in Spanish, developed a close working relationship with significant scholars in Mexico, and spent considerable time in Mexico doing research for publications.

It is a tribute to his perseverance that he not only learned Spanish to be able to better communicate with Mexican scholars and government officials, but also shifted his focus of analysis to include the implications of North American trade relations on Mexico as well. One large-scale project (and most of his books are what he called “his big book projects” e.g. Does North America Exist, 2008, running over 500 pages) is innovative analytically in that he examines whether North America is becoming a cohesive economic and political unit akin to the European Union, with its increasing integration of political, economic, sociological and cultural integration. Because of the dominant power of the U.S. he felt it is incorrect to think North American integration was an embryonic form of European integration. There is no separate political center, and no governance equivalent to that in the EU. He concluded with a sense that the asymmetrical power system in North America might be the template for the regionalism emerging in the twenty-first century.

In a book he co-authored with Matto Mildenberger, Dependent America? How Canada and Mexico Construct U.S. Power, 2011, they turned the usual Canadian approach to the US on its head by examining the impact of Canada and Mexico on the U.S. policy making process. This book contests the idea that US power is self-determined and a result of the autonomous actions of its own citizens’ industriousness. Rather it shows the myriad ways that the US in both the past and present derives benefits from other states’ resources, but even more significantly they delineate and how both countries, rather than recognizing this power, constantly demonstrate dependent-country comportment toward the U.S.

Dependent America is a piece of bold scholarship that takes the entire continent and gives the current economic and political relationships an analytical and grounded historical context. It also gives a framework for understanding the current NAFTA negotiations and the highly volatile political relationships post-Trump.

In all of Stephen Clarkson’s work, his expertise does not lose sight of the knowledge that institutions are grounded in the lives of people and communities. Throughout his work he is acutely aware that the pushback of social movement actors in search of large-scale political change can become change-makers, even when the institutional universe is heavily stacked against them. It comes as no surprise then, that for Clarkson there is no straight line of causality between the fatalism of ”there is no alternative” to the powerful and seemingly unstoppable forces of markets globally and the empowerment of citizens to act collectively and locally.

Stephen resumed his interest in the German language and Germany in the later years of his life. With his wife, Nora Born, he spent about half the year in Canada and half in Germany, where he would lecture and pursue research and writing on subjects related to regionalism.

We very much miss him personally as a good friend but also as an intellectual presence in Canada. He was forthright and fearless in his public commentaries, and was frequently heard on the CBC and Radio-Canada.

The papers to appear in this series in PEF are as follows:

Andrew F. Cooper, “A Critical Appreciation of Stephen Clarkson: Looking Back at his ‘Foundational Text’ on Canadian Foreign Policy”

Michele Rioux, “Globalization and the Neoliberal Trade Agenda @ Bay: New Challenges for Canada and North America

Daniel Drache, “The Clarkson Story Up Until Now and The Uncertain Future Of The WT

[1] Among his many books are: An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada 1968, Canada and the Reagan Challenge: Crisis in the Canadian-American Relationship 1985, Trudeau and our Times (with Christina McCall two vols.) 1990 and 1994, Uncle Sam and us: Globalization, Neoconservatism and the Canadian State 2002, The Big Red Machine: How the Liberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics, 2005, Does North America Exist?: Governing the Continent after NAFTA and 9/11, 2008, A Perilous Imbalance: The Globalization of Canadian Law and Governance (with Stepan Wood), 2010, Dependent America? How Canada and Mexico Construct US Power (with Matto Mildenberger), 2011.

This is a guest post from Rod Hill, a Professor of Economics at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John campus. A previous version of this post first appeared in the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal.

In a report this month for the Halifax-based Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS), entitled “An Alternative to Employment Insurance”, Justin Hatherly proposes replacing the Employment Insurance (EI) system. A look at the proposal quickly reveals how unsatisfactory it is.

Instead of EI, Mr. Hatherly wants individuals and employers to contribute to Personal Security Accounts (PSAs). These accounts would be the property of the individuals, which they could draw upon in certain circumstances in the event of unemployment. The funds would be invested in the stock market by an independent board.

In effect, he is proposing to eliminate EI while expanding the current Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) system with some compulsory contributions, while restricting the withdrawal of those additional funds.

He writes “Persons who lose work through no fault of their own can draw 55 percent of their wages [up to the insured maximum] for 24 weeks, provided they had contributed for 960 hours” (about 24 weeks of full-time work). “Those who left their prior employment voluntarily would be ineligible” – but why deny them access to their own savings? Quitting a job get a better one is something to be encouraged.

Crucially, “those with insufficient savings receive benefits from a common fund financed by general revenue. However, they incur a negative balance and must pay back the government before contributing to their PSA” to be eligible for further withdrawals or loans.

AIMS is proposing that individuals should rely entirely on their own savings or borrowed money to survive during a period of unemployment.

Every insurance system, public or private, has the feature that those who experience a bad outcome (a house fire, a car accident, a health crisis, layoff, and so on) have benefits that are paid by those who have not (yet) experienced a bad outcome. That is the whole point of insurance. Risk for everyone is reduced as risk is pooled across the whole population.

Instead, Mr. Hatherly is inviting people to ‘self insure’ like people do if they fail to buy house insurance. We all know how that turns out if your house burns down.

A few lengthy periods of unemployment would be no more pleasant. When people self-insure, they bear the entire risk themselves. Those with high and steady incomes may be able to shoulder that risk, but most people, particularly those with lower incomes, would not.

I did a calculation to see how this system would work. Someone earning $50,000 a year and making contributions of 4 percent could take 6 years to accumulate enough resources to cover the proposed maximum withdrawal from their Personal Security Accounts. (Under the current EI system, such a person would be guaranteed a minimum of 36 weeks of benefits, not the 24 in the AIMS scheme.)

This assumes that the invested funds would grow steadily. When the last recession began in 2008-2009, the national unemployment rate rose from 6.1 percent to 8.3 percent, while the Toronto Stock market index fell by more than 40 percent. If unemployed workers had been relying on Personal Security Accounts, their funds would have been decimated at the time they needed them the most.

In his report, Mr. Hatherly notes that even unemployment might not diminish the Personal Security Accounts very much because of “restrictive conditions on benefit withdrawal and duration” – a point which underscores the inadequacy of his proposal for maintaining income and spending after job loss.

An important feature of EI is that benefits and the spending they support kick in quickly where and when layoffs occur. This helps shorten recessions by maintaining total spending.

Mr. Hatherly is right about one thing. With workers left to support themselves during periods of unemployment, they will have an incentive to find employment quickly – assuming, as he seems to, that jobs are available. (Particularly in recessions, the number of people looking for work far exceeds the number of job openings.)

However it’s better for both workers and employers if people to take time to find a job well suited to their skills. As well, a lack of income support during unemployment would increase the bargaining power of employers and push down wages.

No one would argue that the existing EI system is perfect. A much criticized feature is its division of the country into regions where eligibility criteria and benefit duration vary greatly.

In those with the lowest unemployment rates, typically urban areas, a minimum of 700 hours of work are required to be eligible for only 14 weeks of benefits. A minimum of 1820 hours (about 46 weeks of full-time work) are needed for 36 weeks of benefits.
In regions with the highest unemployment rates, 420 hours of work gives eligibility for 32 weeks of benefits. The result is a permanent subsidy to regions of high unemployment and inadequate access to EI benefits for many in urban areas. Just because the unemployment rate is low does not mean that it is easy to get a job. Many people are increasingly stuck in ‘precarious work’, temporary or part-time with no job security.

Any change to this system towards one with greater national uniformity would have to be done gradually to avoid undue hardship in high unemployment regions. It would be best done in conjunction with other changes to income supports, such as guaranteed minimum incomes, an idea governments are now seriously considering.

However, but AIMS’ radical proposal to scrap Employment Insurance completely and to leave individual workers on their own to bear all the risk of unemployment is not an improvement.

In this second of a series of housing-related posts I analyze the income and geographic distribution of renter-occupied households in the City of Toronto. My first post focussed on affordability and inequality trends by analyzing time series (2001-16) data for Ontario by household income quintiles. As a complement, this blog studies the income and geographic distribution of low-income and other renter households in Toronto based on census-tract (CT) data for 1996 and 2006. I expect to update and expand on this analysis after 2016 data is released later this year. This Toronto-specific analysis confirms the earlier provincial-level findings with respect to the broader structure and dynamics of the rental market. Based on this more disaggragate basis, I find that increased between-CT household income inequality is being driven by increases in inequality in owner households. The data shows significant income sorting by geography, so that higher (lower) income renters and owners tend to live in the same higher (lower) income CTs. Lower-income renters are concentrated in lower average income CTs, pay lower rents, but face a much higher rent burden. In subsequent posts I will update this analysis and discuss the policy implications and initiatives of these and other findings.

The Financial Accountability Office of Ontario (FAO)—an independent, arm’s length, non-partisan research institute—released a paper on September 12th outlining the likely economic impacts flowing from the pending minimum wage increase (see here). The FAO’s findings are already garnering significant media attention and will almost certainly be used by the opponents of Bill 148 as further proof that the Ontario Government is economically reckless.

Contrary to the study commissioned by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce (which warned of 185,000 jobs lost over two years), the Financial Accountability Office is not institutionally or ideologically wedded to a particular political position. This non-partisanship is reflected in the FAO’s findings, which flagged the potential drawbacks associated with a higher minimum wage, yes, but also included many (though not all) well-documented benefits.

Before I provide my reflection on the study’s contents, I wanted to summarize some of the key findings, both positive and negative.

First the negative findings, which are bound to dominate the headlines:

The single largest and most potent prediction is that a $15 minimum wage will result in the ‘loss of approximately 65,000 jobs’ (50,000 when we take into consideration the job creation associated with greater consumer spending). This will be the headline-grabbing take away from the study. I will return to this claim below, but it is important to note that a $15 minimum wage will not mean that 50,000 workers will lose their jobs.

In response to higher payroll costs, business will try to reduce expenses by increasing automation and by substituting minimum wage workers for higher-paid, more productive workers, thus leading to job losses for workers presently at the minimum wage.

Job losses are expected to be concentrated amongst teens, young adults and recent immigrants.

Business will attempt to raise prices to deal with the higher payroll costs. This, in turn, is expected to reduce sales, which will trigger further job losses.

Consumer price inflation is expected to be ratcheted up by 0.5 percent, which will dampen consumer spending.

The FAO concludes that a higher minimum wage is not an effective tool for alleviating poverty because many people working at the statutory minimum come from affluent (above-median income) households. The FAO estimates that just 27 percent of the total gains in labour income will benefit low-income households, while another one-third will flow to households between the low-income threshold ($46,000) and the median-income households ($92,000), leaving 40 percent of the income gains for households with above-median incomes.

The overall conclusion is unfavourable: by targeting low-income workers instead of low-income households, the pending increase to Ontario’s minimum wage will fail to significantly reduce poverty, though it will cost many Ontarians their jobs.

On the positive side of things, the FAO’s study notes:

Roughly 1.6 million workers will be directly affected by the minimum wage increase (that is 22 percent of the labour market), while those currently making $15-$19 per hour will likely be indirectly affected.

Whereas the majority of people currently working at the statutory minimum wage (520,000 people, or seven percent of the labour market) are either teenagers (15-19 years of age), young adults (20-24) or part-timers, once the $15 minimum wage is brought in, most minimum wage workers will be adults and most will be full-time earners. This suggests that the main group benefitting from the minimum wage increase is the people who are most likely to be economically independent and/or have economic dependents (namely children). I raise this because, ordinarily, the group to be most directly benefitted by an increase to the minimum wage—an increase that would usually range from $0.25 to $1.00—would be the teens and young adults working directly at the statutory minimum. Because the proposed increase to the minimum wage is so large ($3.40/hr over the next 17 months) it will capture many more adults in its net (and many more low-income households, too).

The new minimum wage is expected to redistribute income from businesses to workers, raise total labour income by 1.3 percent by 2019 and, in turn, boost economic activity. The associated increase in consumer spending will stimulate economic activity and lead to 15,000 new jobs being created, thus partially offsetting the 65,000 expected jobs lost.

The scholarly research in Canada finds that higher hourly wages are associated with greater employee satisfaction, reduced turnover and associated training costs, and improved labour productivity, all of which was mentioned (or implicitly recognized) by the FAO study (unlike the study commissioned by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, which focused only on the economic costs of Bill 148).

The scholarly research also suggests that there is no significant impact on adult employment from a higher minimum wage, which the FAO built into their framework.

There is expected to be a significant spillover effect arising from a $15 minimum wage. The FAO assumed that those currently earning between $15 and $17 per hour would experience a wage increase of 7.5 percent and those currently earning $17 to $19 per hour would see their earnings increase by three percent. So it’s not just those under $15 per hour who are scheduled to see an increase. Those currently between $11.40 and $19 per hour will likely see an increase. That’s a big portion of the labour market that is about to get a pay raise!

In what follows, I elaborate and assess the findings contained in the FAO report.

First, and most significantly, a $15 minimum wage is not expected to cause 50,000 people to be laid off. The language used by the FAO is ambiguous on this issue. They refer, variously, to ‘job losses’ and ‘reduced employment’, but in footnote #5 they refer to three dis-employment effects including outright job losses, decelerating job creation and a reduction in hours worked. In conversation with FAO economists, I asked for clarification on this matter and was told that 50,000 workers are not expected to lose their jobs. Rather, the combined dis-employment effects add up to 50,000 jobs equivalent lost.

I doubt the media will note this, and part of the problem flows from language selection, but there is a difference between an existing worker being laid off and the rate of (future) job creation slowing down. In in the former scenario an actual person is made materially worse off, while in the latter situation, a hypothetical worker—someone who is not presently employed, but who may seek work in the future—is not able to find a job. In public policy research there is a balance to be struck between terminological precision and conceptual clarity, on the one hand, and readability and accessibility on the other. I don’t fault the FAO for their choice of words, but the likelihood that their claim will be misinterpreted by large swaths of the public (and by public officials) will approach 100 percent.

Second, it is not clear that the job loss estimates for teens and young adults are in line with the latest economic research. The FAO explicitly references Morley Gunderson’s research on the interplay between teen and young adult employment and the minimum wage. Without citing them directly, though, in conversation with the FAO I learned that they also relied on a more recent inquiry by Pierre Brochu and David Green, who find a much weaker relationship between a higher minimum wage and the dis-employment effects among young workers. The FAO claims that their estimates are based on the ‘mid-point in the range’ of scholarly estimates, which implies that the negative employment effects may well be too high (or too low, as they note).

Third, the demographic makeup of those who may lose their jobs is surely significant, though it went unmentioned in the study. The FAO notes that the dis-employment effects will be most strongly felt by teenagers and young adults. The FAO also notes that many of the beneficiaries of the minimum wage hike will be workers in households with above-median incomes, some even from very affluent families. The implication, confirmed in conversation with FAO economists, is that 50 percent of the job losses are going to be felt by young workers coming from affluent households. From a policy perspective this is important. There is surely a social (and indeed, moral) difference between an individual losing a job who has significant financial responsibilities, including provision for economic dependents (including children), and someone unable to find work who, themselves, is economically dependent on another adult. If future job creation for affluent teenagers is one casualty of higher earnings for low-income working parents, that may be a policy trade-off that is worth making.

Fourth, the figure of 50,000 sounds high, but there was no timeline attached to this estimate. In correspondence with the FAO, I learned that the dis-employment effects will play themselves out in the ‘short to medium term’, meaning a few months to a few years. This is also significant. 50,000 ‘job losses’ in one month will have a very different macroeconomic effect than 50,000 jobs lost over a three-year period. Likewise, had the FAO not used absolute job loss numbers, relying instead on relative job losses, the public perception would be rather different. Just think of the headline: ‘50,000 jobs lost as a consequence of a $15 minimum wage’ in comparison with ‘0.7 percent of Ontario’s labour market likely to be negatively affected by $15 minimum wage’. Both headlines are equally true, but the public perception in the first will be very negative, while the perception in the latter would be indifference (0.7 percent amounts to a rounding error in the context of a labour market of 7.7 million people).

Fifth, there are significant omissions in the study, some of which were flagged but some of which were overlooked. For example, there is well-documented research linking a broad range of health outcomes with income and socio-economic status (see here and here, for example). Moving up the income ladder is associated with improved health outcomes, including life expectancy, and by implication reductions in health care spending and hospital budgets. The relationship between low-income and health outcomes was flagged in footnote #1, but was excluded from the study.

Likewise, recent research by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (two of the greatest living economists) finds that there is a positive relationship between income, on the one hand, and happiness, on the other. In this context, ‘happiness’ can mean either ‘emotional well-being’ or ‘overall life satisfaction’. And while these two dimensions of happiness differ in important ways, both rise with one’s income (though emotional well-being maxes out around $75,000 USD). The Government of Ontario has very few policy levers at its disposal that can directly and immediately improve either the emotional well-being or the overall life satisfaction of roughly two million Ontarian workers and their families. Surely this is a lever that should be pulled.

Similarly, while the economic cost associated with absolute poverty was not assessed, the very well-documented positive social consequences associated with reductions in relative poverty (read: income inequality) were completely overlooked. In its review of the literature, the Ontario Government’s 2014 Advisory Panel on the Minimum Wage noted that a higher minimum wage is associated with both reduced wage inequality and overall income inequality. This is a significant omission and, while it may not have fit inside the parameters of the study, policy-makers cannot remain deaf to the call of income inequality.

Sixth, the FAO’s study overlooked the issue of the gender wage gap (and labour market segmentation, generally). Women are over-represented in minimum wage jobs, including part-time status and in some industries that are heavily reliant on low-wage work, including retail and accommodation & food services. Given the policy significance of the gender wage gap for the Ontario Government’s political objectives, this seems like a considerable oversight. An increase to the minimum wage will likely help close the gender wage gap, as will other provisions with Bill 148, including facilitating access to union representation.

Seventh, poverty is a complex phenomenon with many causes. It must be noted that there is an important distinction between the poverty associated with unemployment and/or the absence of income and the poverty associated with a low-paying job. Clearly, an increase in the minimum wage will not help those who are poor because they do not have a job. A higher minimum wage (nor any single policy instrument, for that matter) cannot solve the problem of poverty as such, though boosting the minimum wage can help alleviate working poverty, both relative and absolute.

Eighth and finally, it is not clear to me that, even if we accept the FAO’s estimates as true, their conclusion necessarily follow from the evidence. The FAO states that 1.6 million people will be directly affected by a $15 minimum wage and that those currently working between $15 and $19 will benefit from the spillover effects. In other words, a very large proportion of Ontario’s labour market is set to receive a pay raise. The Ontario Government certainly has other policy options at its disposal when it comes to improving the economic station of the least well off (including the working income tax credit), but to conclude that a higher minimum wage is an ‘ineffective tool’ for dealing with poverty does not seem in line with the FAO’s findings. A more accurate conclusion, from my perspective, is that a higher minimum wage is not the only tool for dealing with poverty. It is one tool in a broad array of tools, but because the minimum wage will give a large chunk of Ontarian workers a pay raise, I fail to see how this tool could be deemed ‘ineffective’.

There is more to say about this study, but I leave it there for now. It is likely to cause quite a stir in the coming weeks. Let’s just hope the policy discussions that flow therein are factually-grounded.

Overall, this is a much more cautious report than what the Ontario Chamber of Commerce and its allies had furnished, noting both the costs and benefits of $15. While the media is focusing on job loss figures (more on this below), the report predicts a big overall rise in incomes. Even if we assume its job loss estimates come true, the FAO says real labour income will go up by 1.3% after taking into account any negative effects, with over 60% of that going to the bottom 50% of households. Read more »

Oxford University Press has recently released the second edition of Social Policy in Canada, co-authored by the father-daughter duo of Ernie Lightman and Naomi Lightman. I recommend this book as an excellent resource for students of social policy. It will be useful for classroom instruction, while also being a handy reference for researchers, persons who design and administer social policy, and persons who advocate for improved social policy.

Here are 10 things to know:

1. The book does an outstanding job of explaining important ideas in very succinct ways. Chapter 1 explains that low-income earners benefit greatly from Canada’s ‘tax and transfer’ system—since our tax system taxes the rich more than the poor, and then redistributes this income in ways that tend to benefit lower-income households. Chapter 4’s discussion of the family—and why it can’t be relied on as the only source of poverty alleviation—is very good (but should appear much earlier in the book, and should have included a consideration of how some families are more effective than others at advocating for social services for their own family members).

In this first of a series of housing-related posts I analyze rental housing expenditures for low-income households in Ontario. Rent is the single largest expenditure element for renters in the first and second household income quintiles and is therefore an important indicator of housing affordability and expenditure inequality. This is a relatively under-studied component of the overall housing market; most policy analysis in Ontario has focussed on ownership affordability. Rent-related data is comparatively less comprehensive and detailed than ownership-related data and hence an important aspect of this first post consists of data compilation, projections and analysis. In subsequent posts I discuss policy initiatives from the perspective of affordability and inequality for low-income renter households.

On Monday, the Keep Ontario Working coalition spearheaded by the Ontario Chamber of Commerce released an analysis of the impacts of Bill 148 in Ontario, which will introduce a $15 minimum wage by 2019 and a host of other employment standards improvements. The analysis raised many red flags: it focused only on costs, predicting very large negative impacts out of line with decades of research in economics and appeared to include a significant math error. What’s more, the analysis was incomplete: just a few summary slides and no description of how results were derived, the study a black box.

Zohra Jamasi, an economist at the CCPA and I, summarized these concerns in a post at the CCPA’s Behind the Numbers blog. I also outlined the math error, which incorrectly claimed that a 0.7% increase in prices would amount to $1300 of new spending on average per household per year, on Twitter: Read more »

With Alberta and Ontario raising their minimum wage to $15 per hour, and BC possibly following suit soon, the usual suspects have begun their predictable howling about how this is a bad time, or it’s happening too fast, or how it will simply hurt those we are trying to help. It is true that increasing the minimum wage may result in slightly fewer jobs for teenagers, and slightly fewer hours for other workers – but the evidence shows that overall the effect is positive, especially for low income households.

Thank goodness progressive economists have been on the case, with this great analysis of corporate fear mongering from Zohra Jamasi and Michal Rozworski, and Shelia Block’s article explaining how a higher minimum wage will reduce inequality in Ontario.

Cole Eisen has added another dimension to this analysis for Canada – specifically linking short term corporate strategies such as share buybacks to decreased investment in wages & training, which has a negative effect on worker’s share of income as well as long term economic growth. In the UK, Corbyn has made a similar argument (subscribers only), that there should be a link between dividends and fair pay.

Loblaw Companies Ltd. chairman and CEO Galen G. Weston recently joined the chorus of business leaders to come out against the Liberal’s proposal to increase Ontario’s minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2019. Weston – whose family’s sprawling business empire includes Loblaw stores, No Frills, Shoppers Drug Mart and high-end fashion retailer Holt Renfrew – fretted about the proposal’s effect on his bottom line in a call with analysts last week.

This comes on the heels of Queen’s Park’s plan to increase the minimum wage to $14 per hour on January 1, 2018, and then to $15 the following January. A similar policy in Alberta will see the minimum wage raised to $13.60 this October, and increase to $15 in October 2018. Approximately 1 in 5 Albertan workers and 30% of Ontario workers currently earn less than $15 per hour.

Referring to the reforms as “a significant set of financial headwinds,” Weston said “the organization is mobilizing all of its resources to see whether or not it can close that gap,” warning, “at this point, we don’t know the answer.”

He went on to outline possible steps the company would take to mitigate the $190 million dollar increase in labour costs he forecasted would arise from the new minimum wage laws and Quebec’s recent efforts to reduce the price of prescription drugs. These steps included efforts to automate tasks currently done by employees, presumably to make paid workers redundant.

Even if Weston’s $190 million estimate is correct, his suggestion that a company like Loblaw lacks the resources to comply with the policy is misguided.

Canadian research shows that increasing the minimum wage is not just good for workers, but also for individual businesses and the wider economy.

First, and most importantly, it’s pretty tough to get by on minimum wage wherever you live in Canada. So when minimum wage workers get a raise, they usually spend it in their local economy. Economists call this “a higher marginal propensity to consume.” The good news is that with more income, workers can better meet their basic needs, and local businesses benefit from having customers with more money to spend.

But higher minimum wages are also a good strategy for transforming precarious work into decent work. Raising the minimum wage encourages employers to abandon low-wage, high turnover strategies. Instead, employers are more likely to invest in their current workforce, lowering turnover and increasing productivity.

UBC economist David Green suggests that increasing the minimum wage is one of the few mechanisms that encourages employers to abandon an inefficient low-wage, high turnover strategy. This is an important long term impact of increasing wages.

Weston’s claims are also in conflict with Loblaw’s financial statements which clearly show the company can absorb the impact of a policy that will help more than 1.6 million workers in Ontario make ends meet. Last year alone, the company paid shareholders over $1.1 billion dollars with $708 million delivered through share buybacks. Ostensibly finding no productive use for these resources within the firm, Loblaw executives elected to hand this money over those holding company stock – a significant portion of which belongs to Weston and his family.

These numbers are up from a combined total payout of $695 million in 2015 and $675 million in 2014. For a company with 2016 net earnings of $990 million, disbursing that kind of money to shareholders either indicates a lot of excess cash or a broken incentive structure.

For someone who praised family firms’ ability to create value for all stakeholders when freed from the pressures of meeting quarterly targets in a book called Re-imagining Capitalism, Weston’s recent posturing reeks of the myopic outlook that has taken over the provinces’ boardrooms and helped solidify a slow growth equilibrium. Employees are a key piece of any retailer’s success and investment in them is an essential component of realizing long-term value creation.

Over the past several decades, a pivot in corporate strategy that privileges short-term value extraction over growth has seen inequality balloon and economic mobility stagnate.

These trends are by no means natural but are the direct result of policies that eroded both the position of workers within the economy and the conditions necessary for equitable and sustained economic growth. Egged on by tax loopholes, executives face powerful financial incentives to neglect important investment in workers and technology. Directing cash flow towards shareholder payouts, they can pump up share values and trigger large bonus payouts. This leaves little to invest in employees’ capacity.

Breaking this cycle requires more than tinkering with corporate governance requirements or the tax code. Policies that mandate firms recognize the contribution that employees make to their success are necessary to overturn a status quo that has produced a paltry 0.7% increase in real wages over the past 15 years.

Implementing the new policy will require some adjustment on the part of companies as they switch from a model of low wages and high turnover to one based on sustained productivity growth and investment in their employees. However, not only is raising the minimum wage the right thing to do, it also makes good economic sense.

Overall, the NDP leadership race has provided a lot for progressive economists to be excited about.

From progressive tax reform to fair wages and worker’s rights, poverty fighting income transfers to new universal social programs, the four leadership candidates have put substantive and laudable social democratic proposals on the table.

Unfortunately, the last debate waded into unhelpful – if not disingenuous – exchanges on income transfers, means testing and universality, particularly on the topic of Jagmeet Singh’s proposed senior’s guarantee. In the interest of supporting well-informed and honest debate, I want to take this opportunity to clarify what Singh has proposed, and elaborate on why I think targeted income transfers are useful and progressive tools in the fight for economic equality.

What is the Canada Seniors Guarantee?

Critiques of Singh’s income security policy have mainly focused on the Canada Seniors Guarantee, which proposes some changes to the current Old Age Security (OAS).

The guarantee combines a number of existing seniors’ benefits into a single income tested benefit, administered through the tax system. This includes OAS, and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS), but also the regressive & non-refundable Age and Pension Income credits. By adding the Age Credit and the Pension Income Credit, Singh claims an additional $4 billion will be added to the core benefits provided by OAS / GIS. (According to federal tax expenditure data, in 2016 the Age Credit cost $3.3 billion and the Pension Income Credit cost $1.2 billion.)

(Update: this graph only shows the combined Age and Pension benefit available to a single individual, some higher income earners in a couple may have higher benefits from spousal amounts.)

Some of the confusion results from critics who suggest that the OAS is universal. As Andrew Jackson rightly pointed out, OAS begins to be clawed back for those with incomes around $75,000 and is fully phased out for those with taxable income of $120,000. But Guy Caron was correct in pointing out that OAS is near universal, since the vast majority of seniors have taxable income below $75,000. Among those over 65 with any income, fewer than 10% have total incomes over $75,000, and about 4% have total incomes over $100,000 (See CANSIM 111-0008).

I asked Singh’s campaign for more details, and they told me that his new benefit would fully phase out by the time a senior’s individual taxable income is $100,000. Along with the $4 billion from the reallocation of the age credit and the pension credit, this allows a significant increase in benefits for seniors with low and middle incomes by redistributing income that currently goes to the top 5%-10% of income earners over 65.

Not all means-testing is the same.

It is important to note that all four candidates are proposing income tested supports in some capacity – Caron’s basic income, Ashton’s expansion of the GIS and GST tax credits, and Angus’ call for an expansion of the Working Income Tax Benefit (WITB). As they should— income transfers are a key social policy tool in the fight against poverty.

While income-testing is a form of means-testing, some have conflated Singh’s proposed targeted income transfers with other degrading means tests — the endless forms and surveillance rightly reviled for the stigma, barriers and hardship they create for many who rely on provincial social assistance programs. This is clearly an incorrect characterization of his seniors guarantee.

There are also those that suggest that by supporting income tested transfers, one leaves the door open for attacks on universal public programs and services (“the rich can pay for their healthcare”). Social democrats agree that universal social programs serve a public good in and of themselves, that there are social and economic rights that every citizen is entitled to, regardless of means. The debate surrounding targeted poverty reduction methods should not be confused with an attack on these universal programs. All of the leadership candidates, including Singh, are clearly on record supporting universal childcare, pharmacare, and homecare, as well as income tested supports.

Lost in the critiques of Singh’s proposed adjustments to OAS is the fact it is that he is increasing the progressiveness of benefits that are already delivered through the tax system, and that the vast majority of seniors would see an increase in their benefits.

Of course, as Jackson and Rozworski have argued, there is an important case to be made for solidaristic income security programs that are universal, to say nothing of universal social programs Singh clearly supports, and which can build support across social classes for economic security measures delivered as a right.

Difference is good.

While it is useful to clarify our thinking on which programs are best delivered as targeted income transfers, and which are better as delivered universal transfers or services, it is important to remember that the differences between the four candidates on this point are very small. All four candidates are putting forward exciting ideas that are clearly to the left of the debates we had in the last federal election, to say nothing of the current Liberal government.

It’s always good to remember that violent agreement does nothing to advance our thinking. Constructive and honest debate is necessary, healthy – and exciting for lefty policy wonks!

Now let’s have a debate that highlights the flaws in the federal government’s privatization / corporate welfare industrial policy.

To read the media today, one would think that NAFTA is a keystone of Canadian prosperity and that renegotiation could lead to a national economic disaster.

That view has already been rebutted in a report by Scott Sinclair for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. He finds that a reversion to WTO tariffs and trade rules would have only a modest impact, albeit that some auto and agricultural exports would suffer. The key take-away is that we can afford to walk away from a bad deal if necessary.

The International Monetary Fund also do not see an economic disaster in the making in their latest country report on Canada.

In the first place, NAFTA has ultimately been quite disappointing in terms of the performance of the all important manufacturing export sector.

“Staff research has suggested that years of low labor productivity growth has eroded Canada’s external competitiveness in the manufacturing sector and caused a permanent loss of manufacturing capacity. The entry of China into the U.S. market following its accession to the WTO and the appreciation of the Canadian dollar during the oil boom in the mid-2000s made the problem worse. Canada’s early gains in NAFTA have been diminished. Today, Canada’s export share in the U.S. market for non-resource goods is about 11 percent, half of what it used to be in the mid-1990s.” P8.

Second, reversion to WTO tariffs would have only a modest short term impact and the economy as measured by GDP would soon recover.

“Scenario analysis of a tariff increase.

If the U.S. raises the average tariff on imports from Canada by 2.1 percentage points to the WTO most favored nation level, and there is no retaliation from Canada, simulations based on the IMF Global Integrated Monetary and Fiscal Model suggest a negative short-term impact on Canada real GDP of about 0.4 percent. The lower external demand weighs on exports, profits and disposable income, leading to permanently lower investment and private consumption. The Canadian dollar depreciates, softening the effect of the tariffs on exports, but increases the price of foreign goods. The trade balance deteriorates, then recovers as the exchange rate remains depreciated.”

One could add that the end of NAFTA would restore some significant policy space to Canadian governments. In short, we do not need to panic.

I’ve just reviewed a new book about spatial media (and have written it from the vantage point of somebody working in Canada’s homelessness sector).

One point raised in the blog post is the fact that the language used when enumerating persons experiencing homelessness has an impact on policy discussions.

One point raised in the book itself is the fact that large subgroups of the world’s population have little if any Internet access—in Canada, this is particularly relevant to persons experiencing homelessness and to persons living in northern regions.